Ripple

Chapter Thirty-Two

On the way back to Cole’s house, I turn into Sienna’s driveway. Her house, pitch-black, stretches out in front of me. Her parents must be gone again. It seems like they’re always gone these days. I guess in some ways, Sienna is more alone than I am. I try to remember the last time I saw her parents, or even heard her mention them, but I can’t.

I hope she’s okay right now, in that big dark house.

I turn and look at Cole. “Can you . . . can you wait out here? I think I need to do this on my own. I owe her that much.”

He nods and kisses me on the forehead, then gives my hand a squeeze. “Good luck.”

I take in a big gulp of air. “Thanks. I’ll need it.”

I climb out of my car, leaving it running with the heat cranked. Cole’s hair is still wet, matted to his forehead, and we’re both exhausted. But it didn’t seem right to go home without seeing Sienna, making sure she made it back okay.

I walk to the front door, pausing for a second to glance back at Cole, hoping for a reassuring smile, but it’s hard to see more than his shadow behind the glass. I turn back to the front door and knock, fidgeting as I stand there.

Nothing.

I knock again, glancing back at my car. Still, no answer. I step down off the porch and walk around the other side of the house, peering into the dark windows. She must be home by now. Where else would she go?

I knock on the backdoor, but again, no one answers. Reluctantly, I turn the knob, surprised when it clicks open. The soft melody of pop music floats from Sienna’s bedroom. Maybe she didn’t hear me knocking.

I push the door shut, then turn around in the darkness and call out to her. “Sienna?”

Nothing. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I walk slowly, cautiously, across the kitchen, toward her room. “Hello?”

I knock softly on the door, and it nudges open. Warning bells go off in my head. The room is shadowed, quiet except for the music. I almost don’t see her.

She’s sitting on the window seat, staring out at the closed drapes, still as a statue. Shadows stretch along the corners of the room, creep up around me. Why is she sitting in the dark? Staring at nothing?

I swallow. “Sienna?”

She turns and looks at me. Her hair is disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed. She hasn’t changed since she left the lake, mud still clinging to the hem of her pajama pants.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” Her voice is cold, icy, devoid of all emotion, except an undercurrent of anger.

My mouth goes dry.

“Who?” Please say Erik.

“Steven. Erik came over, said there was something really important for me to see, and I followed him up those godforsaken gravel roads for miles. He refused to say a word until we got to the lake, and then he couldn’t stop talking. He called you a siren. Told me that I could hear your voice, but Cole couldn’t, or you’d drown him. He was disappointed when you didn’t sing right away. He was going to pull Cole’s headphones off and let him walk into the water.”

A wave of horror overpowers me. Erik was never going to be the one to kill Cole.

I was.

She turns just enough to let her legs dangle off the edge of the window seat. She’s so short they don’t reach the floor. “I can’t stop thinking about it. About the way you’ve acted these last two years. It wasn’t an accident. You killed Steven. You are the reason he walked into the ocean.”

My heart beats louder in my ears.

Sienna’s voice is razor thin, barely controlled. She’s glaring at me, waiting for an answer.

My breath comes harder, faster, and I fight to choke the tears down. “Sienna, you don’t understand. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even know what I was doing—”

Sienna whips around, grabs the glass of water, and hurls it at me. I duck just in time—it whistles right past my head before shattering against her bedroom wall. I stay crouched on the floor for a heartthumping moment, and then shakily get to my feet to see the anger blazing in her eyes.

The secret that had been wedged between us all this time has now ripped us apart.

“You had to know how much it ate at me, not knowing why he drowned,” she screams. “He was a good swimmer, and I knew the police were wrong. You had to know how hard it’s been to let him go when none of it made sense!”

She grits her teeth so hard I’m shocked they don’t break.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she says, her voice turning low, boiling with fury. “I don’t want to see you. You will change classes. You will stay away from my family, my friends, my fucking lunch table. If you ever speak to me again, I will expose you for what you are.”

“Sien—”

“Go. Now.” She picks up something else from the table next to her—it looks like small jewelry box—and I scramble backward and knock her bedroom door open so hard it punches a small indent in her drywall.

I run through the house, nearly tripping on an area rug, and throw open the front door. My throat hurts—burns with unshed tears. I shove the door shut and struggle to get my feet to work properly.

Cole gets out of the car and rushes to me. I fall into him.

Everything Sienna and I shared, everything we tried to get back, it’s over. I’ll never have my best friend back. It hurts even more than I could have imagined. Hurts more than when I lost her the first time. Because now I know what it’s like without her, and I don’t want to go back to that. But she knows the truth now. She knows I murdered her brother. And she’ll never let me in again.

Cole takes in my wild look, and his eyes dart over to her house.

“She didn’t—”

“No.” I gulp back the tears. “She’s not ... She hates me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, going to hug me.

I pull away. “Let’s just get out of here, okay? Let’s just go to your house.”

I glance back at Sienna’s house one more time as I climb into the car, wondering if I’ll ever set foot in it again, knowing I won’t.

Friendship only survives so much.

I take a shower in Cole’s bathroom, relishing the sting of the hot water over my skin. Every part of me aches, and there are bluish spots all over my body from the fight with Erik. If I could, I’d spend all night in the hot steam of the shower.

I wince as I rub a bar of soap over my sore ribs. It’s like someone put me inside a dryer and left me there for an hour, tumbling around in the barrel. I switch the water off, towel dry, and pull the T-shirt and boxers Cole loaned me and over my limbs. I run a comb through my hair, watching the gentle waves spring back to life.

Not even a murder attempt is enough to ruin my hair.

I stare at myself in the mirror, try to recognize myself. So many things changed tonight.

For starters, I killed again. When Erik told me he loved me, part of me realized I had to leave him. But I never planned on killing him. I grip the edge of the countertop and close my eyes, unable to look back at myself any longer

It doesn’t matter that it was self-defense. That Erik would have surely killed me if I hadn’t done it. I still ended another life. I swallow, willing the tears away. I don’t want to kill again. Ever again. I’ve lost so much because of the water. And now that Erik is gone, now that I know he could never really solve my curse, I might be right back where I started.

If Erik was really lying . . . if this goes on forever . . . I don’t know how long I can handle it. Handle what I am.

A knock on the door makes me jump. “You okay?”

I nod, then realize he can’t see me. “Yep,” I say, forcing my voice to remain neutral.

“Then can you come out of there and talk to me?”

I sigh. Then I double-check that my eyes aren’t as red-rimmed as they feel, and I leave the quiet of his bathroom.

When I walk into his bedroom, my bare feet padding across the luxurious carpet, the nerves in my stomach multiply. Cole sits at the edge of his bed, a remote in his hand, the blue of the television basking him in an odd glow. He’s wearing a faded gray T-shirt, his dark wet hair gracing the collar. He looks natural, at ease in his own environment.

I stop at the foot of the bed and swallow, fighting the urge to wring my hands. I know he must have more questions, but I don’t know if he’s going to like the answers.

There has to be a moment he steps back and realizes this isn’t worth it. That I’m not worth it.

He flicks off the television and drops the remote. The only light in the room comes from the porch light outside, an odd yellow light between the cracks of the partially closed curtains. Cole stands and steps toward me, slinging his arms around my shoulders and crushing me against him.

Relief floods through me as I rest my cheek against his shoulder, breathing in the fresh scent of his bar soap, the same scent that still lingers on my skin. His body is warm, soft, secure, and I could stand like this all day, ignoring the pain on my skin and in my heart.

He steps back just a bit and tilts my head upward with one finger. My eyes snap shut as his lips crash into mine. In a mass of kisses and limbs, we tumble back onto his bed.

Something’s different this time. The wall Cole put up whenever we used do this . . . whenever we went this far . . . is somewhere left behind. We’re twisting and grabbing, pieces of clothing dropping to the floor. His lips are everywhere, my hands sliding up and down his body.

We can’t get enough. Is it a near-death experience, driving us to act like this? Our breaths come in loud, heavy rasps. Cole moves to his nightstand to reach for something, and I nearly yank him back to me. But then he’s back and settling on top of me; and when finally, there’s nothing between us, his entire body against mine, hot skin on skin, our eyes lock.

“I love you,” I whisper, my fingers raking across his bare back. I hadn’t planned to say it, but the words float out with a sigh.

He leans down, rests his forehead against mine so that our eyes are so close, all I can see is a mass of brown and green swirling together, intense with emotion and need. “I love you, too.”

I shut my eyes to keep the lone tear from escaping.

For the first time in my life, I’m not lonely.

I jolt awake.

Awake.

I gasp and spring upright so fast and clumsy that I twist and fall out of bed, yanking the blanket with me in one big puddle of limbs and sheets.

My breath and heart race so fast they compete, and I can’t hear anything but the freight train in my ears. I blink over and over, trying to see in the darkness.

Cole is at my side in an instant, hauling me to my feet. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

My voice comes out so quiet, so low, it’s barely enough to call it a whisper. “I slept.”

“What?”

“I slept,” I say, louder this time, though still shaky. Cole guides me back to the bed, and I sit, perched, on the edge of it. I glance at the clock on his nightstand.

It’s three forty. I slept over three hours. I wiggle my shoulders, flap my arms around, swing my feet off the edge of the bed. I feel . . . better. Some of the achiness has gone away. The sandy feeling behind my eyelids seems to have dissipated. The weight on my shoulders feels like someone removed a few bricks.

“I slept!” I say, louder now, throwing my arms around him. Heat warms my face. We’re both still naked.

I twist around, start scooping clothes off the floor before my cheeks burst into flames. I’ve never been naked in front of a boy before, not like this.

Cole tosses me my shirt and then pulls on his own. “And this is newsworthy?” He’s confused but relieved, too, as he realizes nothing is wrong.

I yank my borrowed boxers up over my hips. “Yes! You don’t understand, Cole. Normal people sleep. People who don’t have curses. I do not sleep, at least not for the last two years. I swim. I go up to the lake.”

He blinks rapidly. Understanding dawns. “So . . . he wasn’t lying? You don’t have to swim now?”

“I don’t know! I think so?” I sit down on the edge of his bed, deflated a little. “I did swim last night, a little. Maybe that’s all this is. But then . . . that really doesn’t explain why I slept. Just why I didn’t need to swim.”

What if this is meaningless? What if I’m just worn out from fighting off Erik all night, and this is just . . . temporary? A heavy silence falls around us. We stare at the ground, sitting side by side on his bed, neither of us speaking.

Hope builds. It might actually be possible. What if this whole time all I needed was to fall in love? With someone who knew the truth and somehow... loved me anyway?

Maybe that’s why Erik went after Cole first. He wanted me to kill him. Make sure I never got what I wanted.

“It can’t be this simple,” I say, more to myself than to Cole. “It can’t possibly be this simple.”

Cole grips my hand. “Occam’s Razor.”

“What?”

He turns to look at me. “It’s usually the simplest answer that’s the right one.”

Nervous, I stand up abruptly and walk to the window, pushing the curtain open. The moon gleams over the ocean, the waves rolling gently to shore. I stare at it for a long moment in silence, waiting to feel that familiar hunger, the strong pull of the ocean. But I feel nothing.

I twist around. “You really think it was you, all along? That trusting you . . . falling for you . . . was the one thing that could undo this whole mess?”

I want to laugh and cry all at once. If it’s true... everything with Erik was for nothing.

Cole stands, shrugging as he walks up to me, pushes a stray, tangled strand of hair over my shoulder. “I don’t know . . . but . . . it could be, right?”

I swallow and nod.

Yes, it’s possible.

Yes, it seems too good to be true.

“We need to go outside. I need to stand on the beach. But if I make one move, if I so much as dip my toes in the surf, you plug your ears and run the other way. No matter what I do. Got it?”

“Yeah. Let me get dressed.” He pulls his pajama pants back on and goes to the closet, taking a hoodie off the top shelf. Then he tosses one at me, and I’m so deep in thought I barely manage to catch it.

He holds the door open for me as I slip into the sweatshirt, my arms lost inside the sleeves. It’s warm and soft and smells like the woodsy scent I’ve missed these last few weeks. He told me he liked going to Tillamook Forest. It must be why he always smelled like the woods.

Cole steps up beside me and reaches for my hand. I surprise myself by pulling away. “Can you just ... stay, like, thirty feet away? I’m afraid if we’re touching and I want the ocean, I’ll drag you in.”

He furrows his brow. “Lexi, you’d never—”

“I don’t trust myself. And right now, you shouldn’t either. Just do it.”

Cole sighs and steps away from me, trailing a dozen yards behind as we reach the beach. My shoes sink as I make my way across, until I’m standing at the edge of the moist, compact sand, just a few feet shy of the line of foam left behind by the waves.

Cole stops where he is, watching me.

I turn to the ocean and stare outward, waiting. Nothing happens. I peer down and push the button on the side of my watch, illuminating the display. 3:57. I should want to swim right now. I should need to swim right now, in the darkness of night, standing on the beach in the middle of the night.

But it’s like waiting on the tracks for a train that never comes. Nothing happens.

I glance back at him again, and then out at the sea.

And then before I know what’s happening, I’m crying, and Cole is standing beside me, pulling me close.

Moments later, when he tips my chin up, I don’t resist.

I just kiss him.