Seven Weeks to Forever, page 5
This is my job, I remind myself, taking a few deep breaths. Then I’m dragging my feet back out of the kitchen and down the hall to where I left Riley.
“Ready?” I ask. There. That at least sounded like I’m not dreading this more than the conversation about Harvard I still have to have with my uncle and aunt, even though I am.
“After you.” He holds open the door, his eyes following me when I pass by him. He’s still watching me when I lock the deadbolt and walk ahead of him to the car.
There’s a white feather on the driveway right beside Riley’s car. It looks almost identical to the one I found after we had lunch the other day, only I know that one is still in my glove compartment. I stop for a moment, not sure if I should leave it there or pick it up. Riley must take that as his cue that I’m waiting for him to be all chivalrous or something, because he appears at my side and opens the passenger door of his car before I can recover and reach for it myself. Terrific. Now we’re definitely acting like this is a date. Damn feather.
“Thanks.” I duck inside of the car. He closes my door and gets into the driver’s seat a moment later. Silence. Well, this is awkward.
Sitting this close to him, I can feel the tingling again. My body sways. I grab hold of the handle on the door and sit up straight in the seat.
“Where are we going tonight?” I ask, fighting to clear the haze from my mind.
He shrugs, and then winks at me. Okay, seriously. Who does that?
He won’t tell me where we’re going until we pull into the parking garage at The Grove. I know it’s home to a bunch of stores and restaurants, but I’ve never been here before. It wasn’t built yet when I was Anna.
I know I’m in deep trouble the second we step off the escalator. Walking into The Grove is like strolling into a fairytale, complete with cobblestones and a trolley. There’s even a fountain in the middle of it all with jumping streams of water. Gorgeous? Yes. And so in-your-face romantic that I have to look away. It’s exactly the kind of place a guy takes a girl on a date, and it’s probably not where you go for a pity dinner. This is bad.
We stop at the entrance to the patio of a restaurant called La Piazza. I normally love Italian food, but I already know that I like it better when I’m eating alone, watching TV. Riley talks to the host while I have another look around. The restaurant’s patio overlooks the fountain and its footbridge. I try not to groan. The view is nice and all, but I can’t help wishing that we were some place on Sunset Boulevard right now, yelling at each other over some horrible band. Better still, it would be so loud that we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other at all. Why did I let him plan this?
I feel Riley nudge me. “After you, ma’am,” he whispers into my ear. I turn my head back to face him and see that our host is waiting for us, holding two menus in his hand. Well, we’re here. Let’s get this over with.
I follow the host, Riley trailing right behind me. “Eighteen years old and already a ma’am,” I say, glancing back over my shoulder. “That came fast.”
“I thought you’d appreciate it more than ‘missy’.”
“You’ve got that right.”
I stop at the table the host is standing beside. We’re on the edge of the patio, only a few feet from the fountain. The host makes a move to pull out my chair for me, but Riley beats him to it. The continuation of date manners. This is more than bad.
Riley sits down across the table from me. I fiddle with my napkin and pretend to watch the fountain until a waiter comes by our table with a basket of bread and asks to take our drink order. My eyes accidentally meet Riley’s when I order an iced tea, which is exactly what I was trying not to do. Eye contact means conversation, and date conversation means that awful small talk people are forced to have in situations exactly like this one. It doesn’t matter that we had a completely normal and easy conversation just a few days ago. It never does when you go on a date.
“So, how’d you spend the rest of your big day?” he asks, once the waiter leaves our table.
There it is. I watch the waiter disappear inside and force myself to move my eyes back to Riley. He unfolds his napkin, waiting for me to answer.
“Big day?” I repeat. I know what he means, but he sounds so formal and like he’s seventy or something. Who even asks that unless they’re on a date, trying to force some kind of horrifying conversation? He should have made this a pity dinner.
“Your birthday. Did you have a good day?”
I kind of want to grab his shoulders and shake him a little bit. I reach for the breadbasket instead.
“It was relaxing,” I tell him. “I went for a run and then read by my pool for a while.”
“Reading anything good?”
I’m not about to tell him I was reading a trashy romance novel that I picked up at the airport in Boston before my flight out here. “Yeah. It’s something about string theory,” I lie.
String theory? I have no idea where that came from, but that’s what dates do to me.
He stops with his fork halfway to his mouth. “String theory?”
Does he really have to pay attention to what I say? Geez.
“Mmm-hmm.” I pray he doesn’t ask me to explain it to him. I’d fail spectacularly.
“Not a romance novel kind of girl?” He reaches for his water glass but seems unable to move his eyes away from me. I feel little electrical currents dance across my skin. When I focus, I see his energy pushing into mine.
“What?” I ask him, when he continues to stare. “Are you afraid of a girl with a brain?” He needs to ease up or I’m going to be jolted out of my chair.
He looks down at his plate. I let out a breath when his energy backs off. “It’s actually kind of sexy,” he says. Or I think he says it, since he’s looking down and mumbling.
My breath catches in my throat. That’s not what I expected him to say, and I have no idea how to answer that. So I do what anyone would do and pretend to find smoothing out my napkin absolutely fascinating.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asks, after a few seconds of silence.
“Hmm? No.” I force myself to look up at him. I can tell he isn’t convinced.
“You have the tiniest little frown on your face right now,” he says.
“Oh. Really?” I hadn’t noticed any muscles in my face moving. The tingling is making it hard to notice much of anything.
“Yeah. I don’t think most people would have noticed it, but—” He stops and looks down at his plate, his cheeks turning the color of tomatoes. I sense we’re headed straight back to small talk, so it may as well be me who starts it this time.
“Do you want the last slice of bread?” I ask. He looks up, but he’s not looking at me.
“It’s all yours.”
Both of us decide at the same moment that it’s a good time to look at the menu. It takes care of conversation for a couple of minutes, anyway. Once I decide on what I’m having, I fold the menu up and set it on the table, turning my head to look out at the courtyard. Streams of water shoot high up into the air from the fountain, the lights making the leaping water look almost like shooting stars. Talk about way too obviously romantic.
Our waiter comes to take our order almost the second Riley puts his menu down and then there we are, back to figuring out what to say. I think for a moment and then grab on to the first thing that comes to mind.
“Did your niece like the record?” His face brightens. I try not to sigh with relief.
“She told me I’m still her favorite uncle when she saw it,” he says. It’s not hard to tell that this kid has him wrapped around her finger. She probably knows it, too. I kind of wish I knew what it was like to have a niece, but I never will.
Dinner gets easier after that, somehow, or at least it does if I’m going by the fact that I no longer want to shake him. He tells me about his job at his parents’ recording studio, and about the first time he saw Lazy Monday play. Whenever the conversation turns to my life, I find a way to steer it back to him. Nice try, but there’s no chance that I’m going to tell him anything more than he already knows. He learned enough about me at lunch a few days ago.
After dinner, we walk through The Grove and the Farmers Market next door, until the shops and stalls start shutting down and we decide to leave. Our fingers brush by accident when we turn around to head back to his car, and for just a second, I think he might take my hand in his. The second passes, though, and he shoves his hands into his pockets. I fumble with my purse, pretending to look for a stick of gum. We walk the rest of the way to the parking garage with about a foot of space between us. Yup, we’ve gone straight back to awkward. Dates are never a good idea.
The radio saves us when Riley starts the car. The song playing is just begging for me to make fun of it.
“Banjos?” I eye him as he pulls out of our parking spot. “Let’s try a rock station, maybe?”
He smirks. “It’s on a rock station.”
“What, did the music director blow out his eardrums at too many real rock shows?”
“Banjos are the new guitar solo. What cave have you been living in?”
“One with much better stations than this.” I lunge for the radio and change the station.
“Keep going,” he warns me. “There’s no dubstep allowed in this car.”
“Yet you allow banjos and call it rock.” I pretend to sigh. “This is a sad day for our friendship.”
“Guess I won’t be giving you my extra ticket to Mumford and Sons.” He turns out of the garage and onto the street.
“I have to wash my hair that night, anyway.”
“You don’t even know what night it is.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He grins, keeping his eyes on the road. I take the opportunity to study him from out of the corner of my eye while pretending to look at something on my phone. When I focus I can see that our energy is joined together, which doesn’t surprise me since I’m tingling again. Little golden sparkles light up the space where our energy meets. The sparkles get bigger and multiply, and the tingling feeling grows stronger. It’s hard to think or speak, so I turn up the radio and we listen to the music blasting through the speakers for the rest of the drive.
I expect to say a quick goodbye in the car after we pull into my driveway, but Riley parks the car and gets out to come open my door. Ah, yes. The walk to the front porch. I know how this walk after a date used to end for me when I was Anna. I also know that kissing the person I’m here to help is a really bad idea.
The logical part of my brain doesn’t seem to be communicating with the rest of me, though. It’s as though I’m under a spell as I put one foot in front of the other, feeling Riley’s hand pressed against the small of my back. My body is going crazy with the tingling I feel. I must stumble, because he steadies me and we stop a few feet away from my front door. I find myself moving even closer to him and for a moment, I’m not Cassidy. There’s something familiar in the energy I feel. Riley’s face blurs in front of me, and then there’s the outline of a face I used to know well.
The outline I can see looks like David. The last time I stood in a driveway about to kiss someone, it was him. I want to say his name, but I can’t move my lips. Then my vision clears and it’s Riley in front of me again, his head bending down and his eyes holding mine. The energy pull between us is magnetic, and I hold my breath when his fingertips come up to my chin.
This can’t happen. I try to tell myself that, but the rest of me isn’t listening. My eyes close and every nerve in my body seems to hum as I wait for what’s coming. I’m going to regret this kiss the second it happens. Then there’s nothing, save for the stroke of a thumb tip across my cheek. My eyes open just in time to see Riley take a step back, his hand dropping to his side like he wasn’t just mere seconds away from brushing my lips with his. He’s standing so straight now, his arms so stiff, I almost think I imagined what just happened. I should be relieved, though. No, make that ecstatic. I can’t say either feeling has hit me yet.
“Do you want to come in for a few minutes?” The words tumble from my mouth before I can stop them, and they don’t feel like mine.
Riley’s mouth curves into a small smile. There’s an expression on his face that I can’t read, and I see him shake his head. “It’s late. I think we should both get some sleep.”
That’s when I notice that the tingling is fading. The energy around us has changed. I focus and see that Riley’s energy is pulled in close around him. The colors are different now, and I can tell that something has his guard up. That’s a little weird. There’s nothing to be afraid of here, since we’re probably in the safest neighborhood in L.A.
“Okay,” I say. “Goodnight, then?”
He touches my shoulder. His fingers rest there for no more than a second, but it’s long enough for me to feel a tremor in his hand.
“Goodnight,” he replies.
I should be grateful that this is how the night is ending, because a goodnight kiss would be a mistake. Instead, I’m confused about his shaking fingers and about why his energy closes in even more tightly around him when he walks down the driveway to his car and gets inside.
I turn around before he can see me watching him and hurry to open the front door. I don’t know if he’s even out of the driveway yet when I close the door behind me and lean against it, feeling short of breath.
My legs crumple beneath me and I feel myself hit the floor. Everything goes black.
Chapter Six
“Welcome back.”
Everything in front of me is blurry when I open my eyes. It takes a few seconds for the room to come into focus. I’m in the foyer, lying on the floor. Noah is kneeling beside me.
I push myself into a sitting position, maybe a little too fast. My body pitches to the side and my head comes dangerously close to the floor again, my blood seeming to rush up to my temples all at once. Noah’s arm shoots out to steady me.
“What happened?” I croak, letting him pull me back up. My skin feels clammy.
“Funny you should ask.”
I don’t see how there could be anything funny about blacking out and finding myself on the floor. My brain and my voice aren’t cooperating too well, though, and it feels like way too much work to tell him this.
“Why don’t we get you outside for some air?” he suggests. “That might help.”
I nod and let him help me to my feet, swaying a little as I stand. He waits until he’s sure I have my balance and then leads me down the hall and through the living room, outside to the balcony. I sit down on the loveseat, stretching out and leaning my head against the cushions. That’s better. It feels less like the world is spinning. Noah takes the chair across from me.
I breathe in the cool air, looking past Noah and out into the darkened sky. I haven’t seen stars since leaving Boston, since the city lights here block out almost everything but the moon. But there’s a place just outside of the city where it’s dark enough to see thousands or maybe even millions of stars and the trails of stardust in between them. It was my favorite place to go when I was Anna. I haven’t been back since then.
“How are you feeling?” Noah asks.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the dull throbbing in my head. “Not like I could leap a tall building or anything, but better. My head hurts a little.”
“It will for a while. That happens when your energy gets that weak.”
So that’s what this is all about. Nobody ever told me that weak energy could make me pass out. I open my eyes and look at Noah.
“How did my energy get that low?” I ask.
“From connecting with Riley’s energy. That’s my best guess, anyway.” He stretches his legs out in front of him, shifting down in the chair. Great, he’s getting comfortable. It looks like this conversation is going to take a while.
“Is that supposed to happen?”
“It can. His energy has more of a pull on you than anyone else you’ve spent time with in The Before, because you’re here to help him. You just connect that way. You’ll give him as much energy as he needs, but his energy is naturally lower than yours since he’s not a second-timer. That means when your energy connects with his and you make his energy stronger, your energy gets weaker.”
“And you couldn’t have told me this before I went out with him tonight?” It’s not like Noah has had eighteen years to mention it or anything. No big deal.
He ignores the sarcasm in my voice. “I didn’t know your energy would get this weak, or that it would happen so fast. The way you connect to The Life-After to level out your energy might not be enough for you anymore.”
I squint at him. Unless there’s something he hasn’t explained how to do over the years, I’m pretty sure I have zero control over how I connect. The Life-After takes care of that part. Maybe he means how often I do it.
“You want me to connect more than once a day?” I ask.
“I want you to connect a little more strongly.”
“Do you mean you want me to stay connected for longer?” I can’t see how I’d do that, either, since I just get disconnected when my energy is where it needs to be.
He shakes his head. “There’s someone I want you to see who can help. Her name is Amarleen.”
“Is she another advisor?” I ask. Let’s hope not. Two wardens is exactly what I don’t need.
“She’s a teacher at Diamond Lotus Yoga. I want you to join her class.”
I watch his face. If he’s pulling my leg, then he’s an even better actor than I was when I was Anna.
“You want me to go to a yoga class to make my energy stronger?” I ask the question slowly, trying to make sure he means what I think he does. “Like hot rooms crammed with people in spandex, sweating it out to downward dog and trying to out-leg-lift the person beside them while they pretend to be one with the world?” My eyebrows are so high, I’m surprised they haven’t shot off my forehead.
