Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 9
I swallowed hard at the reminder, my hand instinctively grasping the pinkie where my sweet little ring was missing. I still didn’t know if Adam had even made it back from the portal two nights ago. And if he had, well, then there would be a reckoning with him that I would have to deal with.
“It’s due soon,” I said through my dry throat.
Just then, my phone vibrated on the floor, and I looked down to see Video call incoming on the screen with Robbie’s photo behind it.
Dad smiled. “I’ll leave you two to talk.” Standing up to go, he couldn’t help but rub my head like he had done when I was a kid.
“Proud of you, baby!” he cheered, pumping one fist as he left and chanting softly into his cupped hand to imitate a crowded stadium, “MIT, MIT, MIT . . .”
I couldn’t help but laugh as I reached for my phone. No matter what I decided, knowing that I had made my dad proud was at least something.
“Hey, sis.” Robbie smiled as soon as I swiped the phone. He looked like he was in a Starbucks, a chocolate croissant in the hand not holding the phone up.
“Hey,” I said back, my heart leaping at the sight of him. Robbie looked great, tan and healthy. And there was something in his eyes that had been missing when I had first rescued him from the DW train. A liveliness, maybe. A spark. For a while there, I had been terrified that some intrinsic part of him had died on that train. It was the main reason I had been so hesitant to go back into Yesterday and redo the past—Robbie was happy with his childhood in Portland, happy not remembering his other self.
Seeing that glow in his eyes over the phone, I thrilled to the idea that maybe he was even happier now that he had gotten the best of both worlds—the safe childhood with Mom in Oregon, but also the memory that he had had a childhood with a dad and a sister who loved him. Now he truly had a life of his own choosing. A life with Piper.
“Dad told me the good news,” he said, chomping off a bite of the croissant. “It’s amazing. I’m not surprised, though.”
“I haven’t had time,” I stuttered, “to process it all.”
“There will be time when you get here,” he said, smiling. “Then everything will be perfect.”
“Robbie—”
“Congratulations, Marina!” a familiar voice shouted from else-where in the Starbucks, and Robbie turned the phone to show Piper’s glowing face. “I knew you could do it, sis!”
“Piper, hi,” I said, tripping over her name a bit. Where did she and I stand now, I wondered, since I was dating her ex-boyfriend?
But no matter how Piper felt about that, it didn’t seem to be a problem. She blew me a kiss before curling her perfect lips to blow onto her hot drink. “Are you excited?” she asked.
“Totally.” I cleared my throat, combing through my hair with my fingers. “Sorry, I’m still in bed.”
“That’s okay. Let’s talk later?”
“Sure.”
The phone swiveled back to Robbie as he and Piper walked out of the Starbucks and headed towards a car. I could hear the doors opening and a distant siren wailing.
“I’m really happy for you, M,” Robbie said, standing by the car. A crystal-blue sky framed his face, and I wanted desperately to reach into the phone and hug him. Robbie had always made things make sense for me, even impossible things.
“Robbie, can I ask you something?” I realized I was whispering, although I was pretty sure Piper had already gotten in the car. I didn’t want anyone to hear this but him.
“Yeah?”
“Did you . . .” I had to inhale some fresh air before finishing the question. “Did you ever forgive Kieren?”
Robbie’s face froze for a split second, and I wondered if the call had dropped. But then he laughed. It was a strange laugh, coming from Robbie. Bitter and ironic. The kind of laugh I’d heard from him when he was trapped between dimensions. “For which thing?” he finally asked. “Daring me to get hit by a train or cheating on you?”
Now it was my turn to freeze. I could feel my facial muscles tense and harden with the words, petrifying like ancient wood. My face must’ve revealed everything that was happening inside my brain.
“Oh, God,” Robbie said, realizing his mistake. “You didn’t know.
I’m sorry, Brady told me months ago, and I just assumed—”
“I have to go, Robbie.”
“I’m sorry, M, I thought you knew—”
“It’s okay. I’ll call you later.”
“M? Wait, Marina—”
But I had already hung up. I dropped the phone from my ear and let it plunk down onto the bed, then pushed and kicked it away from me like it was made of poison.
Chapter Thirteen
“My mother’s gonna kill me,” Christy muttered to herself, driving with both hands clutching the wheel and furiously scanning her rearview mirror. “I’ve never ditched school in my life.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” I offered, my eyes glued to the map on my phone to determine how many minutes remained before arriving at Kieren’s school.
“I should have just loaned you the car. Then I could have gone to class.”
“You really want me driving your car with no insurance? I’m the worst driver on the planet. Why do you think I bike everywhere?”
“’Cause you can’t afford a car?”
“That too. Turn right here.”
Christy drove for a few minutes in silence, twisting her mouth into anxious zigzags. “Okay, can I just ask you something?”
“If your mother finds out, I’ll tell her it was my fault.”
“Not that.”
“It’s another three miles, then turn left.”
Christy turned the front defrost on, clearing up a fine layer of condensation that had formed on the windshield. She was waiting for me to respond, I knew, but I was afraid of what her question would be.
“What is it?” I finally asked.
She hesitated briefly before opening her mouth. “I just . . . I don’t understand why we’re doing this. You haven’t talked about this guy in almost a year. And you seem really happy with Brady. He’s actually warm with you, he has a sense of humor. He treats you well.”
“Kieren treated me well.”
“Real y? When? When he went to college and didn’t call you for a month? Or when you stopped by his dad’s phone store and found him in the back room whispering with that girl?”
“When was that?” I asked stupidly, realizing immediately that it would seem like an odd thing to have forgotten.
“Seriously, you know when, Marina. It was like two weeks before last Christmas. Remember? Because you had gone in to ask him what he wanted.”
“They were just whispering,” I said, more for my own benefit than hers. “It could have been about work or something.”
“Marina, honey, you are fooling yourself. You told me you were over this guy. What is this about? Did something new happen?
Did he drunk-dial you or something?”
“No, it’s not that. I just . . . I can’t explain it, Christy, but I need to talk to him.”
Christy made the right turn in to the campus gate, and we waited our turn for the car in front of us to finish checking in with the security guard.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” she said as she pulled into a parking garage before softly adding, “Again.”
° ° °
I could only assume that the address I had for Kieren in my phone was still his dorm, although it occurred to me that it might have been old information. What if he’d moved this year, now that he was a sophomore? What if he wasn’t even living on campus anymore? Was I standing outside this dorm, freezing my butt off while Christy went to find a coffee place to do homework, for absolutely no reason?
I was about to give up when a tall blond man that I didn’t even recognize at first came out of the front door with two other young men. He zipped up his winter coat as he walked and laughed at something his friend was saying. Jesus, could that really be Kieren? How had he aged so much in less than a year and a half?
I knew from his pictures online, of course, that he had filled out some. Maybe the Reserves had him lifting weights or something, but he looked like a totally different person. Like a grown man who had swallowed up the kid I used to know.
It took him a moment to recognize me too, or maybe it was just the disconnect of seeing me standing there, but he almost walked right by me. When his gray eyes finally did latch on to mine, I swear he almost fell over.
“Guys, I’ll meet you in class,” he finally said to his two friends, one of whom sported an actual full beard. They sauntered off while Kieren walked up to me, and I realized I was shivering all the way down to my spine. It was freezing out, but that wasn’t the reason. I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck.
“Hi,” I said, wanting to run to him and throw myself into his arms. But that’s not where we were, was it?
“Hi.” There was a sadness in his voice, even in such a short word.
A defeat.
“Can we talk?”
Instead of answering, he just drew in a huge breath and slowly let it slide out of his tight lips. I was clearly opening up an old wound here, but I didn’t care. I needed answers.
“I thought you didn’t want to,” he said.
“Well, now I do.”
“Jesus, you’re freezing. Let’s go in the lobby or something.”
“Right here,” I insisted.
“M, there’s nothing left to say,” he began to protest, but then a thought seemed to occur to him. “Are you in trouble?”
“Trouble?” I shook my head in confusion. What kind—Jesus, did he think I was pregnant or something? Is that what he thought of me, that I would come to tell him something like that when . . . when it wouldn’t even have been his? “No.”
“Then what?” He seemed tightly wound, anxious, like he just wanted to get to class and I had screwed up all his plans.
“What happened to us, Kieren?”
“M, we’ve been over this a million times, I can’t do it again.” His voice cracked with exhaustion, and I swear I saw a tear start to form in his eye. Or was that just the cold?
“One more time.”
“It’s like I told you on the phone that night—things were just different when I got to school. I was alone, I was confused. You were still in high school half an hour away—”
“Stephanie?” I asked, barely able to spit out her name.
He sighed deeply, clenching back an emotion that was either anger or frustration, I couldn’t tell which. “I asked you to give me some time to think,” he said with hard, measured words. “You said you would.”
“And I told you I would always love you,” I insisted.
“Yeah, you did. And how about that?” He took a step closer to me, the seed of anger I had sensed a moment before coming to the surface. “Did you know I called you a couple nights later to talk about that?”
I shook my head. Obviously I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
“And Brady answered your phone.”
I swallowed hard, trying to make sense of it. Had I really moved on with Brady just days after telling Kieren I loved him? Was that something I would do?
“Why are you acting like you don’t remember this?” he asked, throwing up his hands. “Like we haven’t been over it to death?”
I could only stand there dumbly, shaking my head and fighting back a new wave of tears. “I didn’t . . .” I began, not sure what to say. “I didn’t remember.”
Suddenly, a new light came into Kieren’s eyes—this time, one of fear. “M, what did you do?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said meekly, starting to walk away, but he didn’t let me get far before grabbing my arm.
“Have you . . .” He looked around quickly before continuing.
“Have you been in DW?”
I didn’t want to admit it, but my silence seemed to answer his question.
“What the hell have you done, M?”
“I had to.”
“You had to what?” he demanded.
“I had to go in and fix something.”
But he wasn’t accepting that answer. He clenched my arm even tighter and stepped even closer, so that he was right above me now, and I had to tilt my head up into the harsh, freezing air to look at him. “We promised,” he whispered.
“The night we went through Yesterday, Kieren, the night we went to Portland . . .”
“What about it?”
“The first time we did it . . .”
“First time?” he asked, his face a wall of apprehension.
“The first time . . . you didn’t make it.”
The words hit him like a tsunami. He stepped away from me, shaking his head.
“I went back for you.” I answered the unspoken question in his eyes. “For us.”
Kieren buried his face in his hands, wavering on his tall legs.
I thought he might fall over, and it took him several seconds to steady himself.
“Because I didn’t think anything could hurt worse than living without you,” I continued. I knew I was digging the knife in deeper, but I didn’t care. I wanted him to feel this pain twisting inside me. I wanted it to be fresh for him, like it was for me. Maybe just so that, for one minute, we could finally be in the same place at the same time.
“M.”
“But I was wrong,” I finished, finally finding the courage to walk away from him. I had to get as far away as possible, find Christy in that coffee shop and beg her to take me home. I never wanted to come here again, never wanted to look into his cold, hard eyes and see something I never thought he was capable of: indifference.
I ran as quickly as possible down the street, and I only looked back once to see if he was following me.
He wasn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
I sat at the dinner table, staring at the uneaten bowl of Cheerios I had made myself for dinner. The little oat rings had been floating in the milk for so long they had started to bloat and fall apart, like defective lifesavers.
“Marina?” Laura asked gently from the kitchen door. “Can I make you something else?”
I cleared my throat, pushing away the bowl. “No, I’m just not hungry. Thank you, though, Laura.”
“Okay. Your dad and I are going to head up to bed.”
I glanced at the clock above her head. It was 10:00 p.m. God, I’d been sitting here for an hour. “Good night,” I said, forcing a smile.
“’Night, sweetheart.”
I waited a full minute after she left before getting up and dumping the soggy remains of my dinner in the sink. I was scrubbing the bowl out when my phone buzzed on the counter next to me.
A text from Brady.
I’m sorry.
I put the bowl in the drying rack, wiping my hands on my jeans.
I’m sorry too, I wrote back.
No, it’s my fault.
I sighed, not knowing what to write back. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t want me to go to Boston. It was totally understandable. His ex-girlfriend and the guy who stole her from him were both there.
He wanted nothing to do with the place, and I couldn’t blame him.
But a gnawing worry came back to taunt me as I stared at his text. Brady had told me once that he didn’t have a family—or rather, that he had a family of his own making. His cousin. His friends. And Piper.
Now that Piper was gone, was I just some sort of replacement—some way of filling that Piper-sized hole she’d left behind? And if it weren’t for me, would he have filled that blank space with some other girl?
He had told me twice now that I reminded him of Piper. Is that why he was with me? And if so, why was I with him? Did I love him? I had always been wildly attracted to Brady, and for a while, when we were in Oregon together, I had really started falling for him hard. He was funny. He was protective of me, shielding my body with his whenever he sensed danger.
I’d always thought Kieren was the one looking out for me. But maybe it had been Brady all the time.
I’m outside, came a new text. Can I come in?
I walked to the front door and opened it, seeing his car in the driveway. “Brady?” I called out.
“Over here.”
He was over by the kitchen entrance, but he walked around to meet me.
“Hey,” I said, smiling at the sight of him. After my day from hell, seeing his open, friendly face was like taking strong medicine.
“Hey.” He smiled back. He was hesitant for a moment, but then came up and opened his arms. I threw myself into them and let him hold me in the doorway for a minute. He kissed the top of my head, and I squeezed him even tighter.
“Come inside,” I offered.
We walked to the kitchen, and he grabbed himself a soda from the fridge before sitting down. I couldn’t help but smile to see him so at home here. Brady had never had much of a real home. His cousin was nice to him, but he wasn’t exactly loving. And even if he had been, nothing could have taken the place of the mother who had left the family and then died when Brady was just a kid.
Maybe he’d found a home here, I realized. With Laura making sure he got a warm dinner, and my dad shaking his hand when he came over. And with me.
“I really am sorry I acted that way.”
I shook my head, not sure what he meant.
“That school means a lot to you. You should go.”
“I haven’t even been accepted, Brady.”
“You will be.”
I hesitated a moment, not sure if this was ground we had already covered. But I needed to say it. “You could come with me.”
He took a sip of his soda, and I could hear the little bubbles popping against his upper lip. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “There are lots of gas stations in Boston I could work at.”
“Hey,” I said, waiting for him to look up at me. When he didn’t, I went to him and sat on his lap. He opened up his body to bring me even closer to him and gently pushed some hair behind my ear while I looked up into his impossibly beautiful brown eyes. “Don’t talk about my boyfriend that way.”
He laughed and kissed me, then looked in the general direction of the stairs. “Are they asleep?” he whispered.
