“Don’t start pointing fingers,” she snaps, icicles forming through the phone line from her tone. “I came across your journal by accident. Should I have read it? No. But I never expected to read that. Not ever. You’ve always been the one thing in my entire life that I can count on. And I think that’s what hurts the most. I know now that I can’t count on you. I can’t count on anyone.”
She starts crying and my heart breaks a little.
“Becca, please. Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I promise. I would rather die than hurt you. You’re my best friend and that’s why I didn’t tell you. It’s because I didn’t want to hurt you. I promise, I don’t even like Quinn anymore so you don’t have anything to worry about. I met someone here and he’s amazing. And so you don’t have to worry about me and Quinn. I promise.”
“Your promises don’t mean much,” she snaps. “And I’m not worried about you and Quinn. There is no you and Quinn. Just like there’s no you and me. Not anymore.”
I start to answer but realize that the line is dead. For the first time ever, in the history of our relationship, Becca has hung up on me. I think she probably hates me. And I can hardly bear it.
“Are you okay?” Mia asks in concern.
Mia’s thick black eyeliner is smearing in the heat and I realize that she’s been standing there all along. I was so caught up in my dramatic phone call that I hadn’t even realized it. Just like I hadn’t realized that Elena and her cronies had stopped and were staring at me. And listening to me. Elena’s emerald green eyes glimmered dangerously as they met mine and I know that she heard every word.
“So,” Elena says icily, flipping her perfect hair over her perfect shoulder. “Just who did you meet here in Caberra, Reece? I know you’re not talking about Dante. Because I will happily claw your pathetic, hick-a-billy eyes out before you ever dream of making a move on Dante. Do you understand me? Dante is mine. He will always be mine. You don’t stand a chance, farm girl.”
I nod silently because I’m not sure what else to do. Because I don’t have it in me to argue or fight. My best friend had just yanked my guts out through my cell phone.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Elena says, then turns a perfect high heel on me and walks away.
Complete. And utter. Bitch.
Chapter Eleven
“Come on,” Mia tells me, yanking my arm and dragging me behind her. I follow limply. I don’t really care where we go. My insides feel smashed.
She leads me to a little coffee vendor on the sidewalk where she speaks fast Caberran and the dark-haired barista (Is that what they call them here?) quickly makes two dark, foaming cups of something. He hands one to me and Mia pays and I sniff at it. It smells strong.
“Drink it,” Mia advises. “You need it.”
“Is there alcohol in here?” I ask suspiciously, because Mia is in the midst of a full-blown rebellion against her parents and I wouldn’t put it past her to drink a coffee-tini for breakfast. She laughs and shakes her head.
“No, but there should be. You need it. But this will have to do.”
I sip at it and it burns my lip, but in a very delicious way. “What is it?”
“It’s our version of Italian Espresso,” she tells me as she closes her eyes and takes a long gulp. “It’s my version of heaven.”
She looks around. “You need one more thing,” she muses. “Follow me.”
She leads me to another vendor- they have so many here with cute little fold-up carts- and this time, she buys chocolates from an ancient white haired lady with cloudy, scary eyes. The old lady has a bright red silk scarf wrapped around her head and even though it looks like she is blind, she still looks at people straight in the eye. It’s unnerving.
“All will work out for you, young one,” she tells me, looking at me with her creepy eyes. Her fingers are gnarled and they dart out to grab my hand. She feels my palm and slides her wrinkled fingers up to my wrist, where they press against my pulse-point.
“You are strong,” she says, closing her eyes. “Strong enough.”
Mia and I look at each other wide-eyed and I pull my hand away as politely as I can. I can still feel exactly where the old woman’s claw-like fingers were grasping me and I rub at the spot.
“Strong enough for what?” I ask hesitantly as Mia hands me the chocolate that she had just bought from the old woman.
The old lady nods. “Strong enough to protect your heart.”
She closes her eyes and begins humming, oblivious to us now.
Mia looks at me and makes a circle next to her temples with her fingers.
Cuckoo, she mouths to me.
I nod. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. This old lady has lost her marbles. If she ever had them in the first place, which is highly, highly debatable.
We sit on a nearby bench underneath a tree with weeping branches and I decide that it’s the perfect place for me to sit. Poetically perfect because I feel like weeping too.
“Get your chin up,” Mia demands. “I’m serious. Did you screw over your friend? Maybe. But can you do anything about it from thousands of miles away? No. You’ve got to live in the here and now. You’ll fix it when you are able to. You’re a nice person, I can tell. You didn’t purposely hurt anyone. Your friend is being a dumbass.”
I stare at her.
“Was that supposed to be a pep talk?”
Mia laughs. “I’m not that good at pep talks,” she admits with a shrug. “I’m more of a ‘walk it off’ type of person. I don’t dwell on things. Especially things I can’t change.”
“I didn’t screw over Becca,” I tell her. “I had a crush on her boyfriend. I can’t help that, can I? I never acted on it. I never told him. And I don’t have a crush on him anymore. That means something, right?”
Mia nods in agreement as she takes a bite out of her little chocolate mountain. I’m not sure exactly what our candies are, but they look like tiny volcanoes.
“No. You can’t help that. And as far as I’m concerned, you didn’t do anything wrong. Americans are so uptight,” she observes. “You get your panties in a wad over the slightest little thing.”
“You wouldn’t be mad if your best friend had a crush on your boyfriend?” I ask dubiously. Because I don’t believe it. Anyone would be mad, American, British, Caberran, whatever.
She shrugs again. “I don’t know. I don’t have a boyfriend or a best friend. So I can’t reply to that with any amount of accuracy.”
I stare at her as a bite of the sent-from-heaven chocolate volcano lava melts in my mouth.
“You don’t have a best friend?” I ask, dubious once more. Everyone has a best friend.
“Nope.” She shakes her head and honestly doesn’t seem bothered by it. “My father has always been very picky about who I can hang around with. He’s the Minister of Defense for Dante’s father. He’s very picky about image and public relations and being politically correct and all of that ridiculousness. He won’t let me hang out with just anyone. And the people that he will allow, aside from Dante, are all douche-bags. So I would rather be alone.”
And now her slight rebellious act of dressing like a goth made total sense, I decide as I stare at her jet-black fingernail polish. Her dad is a complete control freak. He deserves it.
“What does he think about you hanging out with an American?” I ask with a grin.
She smiles.
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“Agreed.” I smile back, feeling like we’re co-conspirators and oddly enough, not feeling offended at the thought that being American was a crime.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” Mia asks as she licks the chocolate lava from her fingers. I shrug.
“I don’t have any.”
“Well, that’s a crime,” she announces. “A true crime. Look around you! The day is young, the sky is blue, the sun is out. How do you like scuba-diving?”
I freeze, with vivid images of JAWS stuc
k in my head. In my mind, his gigantic jaws are swallowing me whole.
No, scratch that.
He’s biting me in half and blood is turning the water red.
Yeah, that’s it.
That’s exactly what will happen if I step one foot into the ocean here.
I’ll die a bloody death as shark food and my mom will never see me again. Mia laughs at the look on my face.
“It’s amazing,” she tells me. “You’ve got to try it. We’ll start you out snorkeling because you probably won’t be here long enough for a scuba-diving course.”
“Nope. No way,” I answer adamantly, shaking my head. “Dante told me about your little shark problem. You’ll never get me to do it.”
Thirty minutes later, I’m in the water with a rubber mask strapped to my face. It can never be said that I’m not adventurous when forced to be.
Mia shows me how to get water out of the tube when it leaks in by blowing it out sharply. She tells me that the most common problem is when new divers get flustered when water gets into their tubes. I’m supposed to keep calm and simply blow the water out. That’s a little difficult to do when I’m so completely focused on watching for sharks.
We swim and after a few minutes, more like thirty, I start to feel more at ease.
Every once in a while, Mia reaches out and grabs my hand and pulls me to a different place where we watch tropical fish leisurely swim in their little schools. Or a sea turtle gliding gracefully by. Or colorful tropical plants waving in the current.
Under the surface, the water is perfect and aqua and silent. There is no drama, there are no mean girls and best friends and boys that I shouldn’t have crushes on but do anyway.
I sort of love it.
I kick my legs, letting the water flow fluidly over me. I am weightless here. I am relaxed and I haven’t been this comfortable in a long time.
Just as I am thinking about how wrong I had been to be terrified of sharks and about how wonderful this is and how I have never been this comfortable or relaxed in my whole entire life, I spot something out of the corner of my eye that makes me freeze.
A gray bump slowly coming toward me.
I pull my head out of the water so that I can see better and find that Mia is nowhere near. But the gray sleek bump is only a hundred yards away and getting closer by the minute. I flail and splash, then remember from watching Shark Week on TV that you definitely don’t want to splash.
Sweet Holy Monkeys. What the eff do I do??
I yell for Mia, but don’t see her. Has she been eaten?
I look around frantically, but we’ve drifted to an isolated location and there isn’t anyone else here.
Except for me and the shark.
And the shark is certainly taking his time to reach me.
Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
Oh. My. Gosh.
My breathing comes in pants as I try to slowly and calmly paddle backward, away from the shark, toward land, away from the shark. Toward Land. Away. From. The. Shark.
Then, a fin emerges. A fin. And I scream. And scream. And forget about not splashing. I am splashing so much that every shark and sea creature in a hundred mile radius will know that I’m here. And I don’t care. All I care about it surviving this shark attack. Because it is going to attack me. It’s stalking me right now like the prey that I am. And very soon that water around me will be red because I’m going to die a bloody death.
And then I notice that the fin is made from hands. A pair of hands.
I freeze.
What the eff?
Dante bursts from the water, wearing gray swim trunks and shaking droplets from his hair as he lunges to grab me with a roar.
I scream again because it’s happened so fast and my brain hasn’t had a chance to truly realize that it is Dante and not a shark.
I’m not going to die.
I’m not going to die.
I’m not going to die.
I’m not going to become breakfast for JAWS.
But I’m going to kill Dante.
I’m so mad that I smack him on the arm. And smack him again.
“Dante, what the hell?” I demand angrily, so mad that I’m seeing spots. “Not funny! So not funny!”
He looks confused, then startled as it registers with him that I am truly pissed off. Severely and completely pissed off. Both with him for pulling the stupidest and oldest prank ever and with myself for falling for it.
Oh-my-gosh-I’m-such-an-idiot.
I try to force my heart rate to slow down before I become the first seventeen-year old in the history of the world to die from heart failure in the middle of a fake shark attack. I definitely don’t want that on my tombstone.
Here lies Reece Ellis: Dumbass.
“I’m sorry,” Dante tells me quickly, reaching for me. I kick away from him, still furious.
“I’m really sorry,” he tells me again, swimming toward me.
Even soaking wet, he is gorgeous. Maybe even more so than when he is dry, if that is even possible. The water runs over his defined muscles, the sun catches the highlights in his hair. His blue eyes are contrite, his expression apologetic. His jawline chiseled, his chest rock hard. Wait. I don’t want to notice those things right now.
I’m pissed, I remind myself. Seriously pissed.
He reaches out for my arm and this time, his long fingers wrap around my wrist and pull me to him. He folds me into a hug, a sincere hug, and holds me tight.
And I’m not pissed anymore.
Dante’s body is long and lean, his arms strong and bulging and wrapped around me right now. He’s wet and slippery and so am I and I’m going to internally combust. He smells like soap and salt and sun and I can’t breathe.
Sweet baby monkeys.
We tread water and Dante tells me again how sorry he is. He’s cold and I’m cold and my lip starts to quiver because I’m freezing. And also nervous because the most beautiful boy in the world has his arms around me.
Dante looks down into my eyes, his arms still wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me tightly to his chest. I feel every inch of him pressed against me- every inch- and I might die. Seriously die.
“I’m stupid,” he tells me with his super-sexy accent. “Reece, I didn’t realize how afraid you are of sharks. That was a stupid prank and I will make it up to you, okay?”
He looks seriously into my eyes, his face so sweet and gorgeous and sincere. How can I stay mad at him when he is so unbelievably sweet and gorgeous and sincere?
I can’t.
I nod instead.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. He tightens his hold on me as we kick to tread water and I enjoy the hardness of his body and how every plane of his chest ripples when he moves.
He bends his head and I think… I’m pretty sure… I know… he’s going to kiss me.
But he flicks his fingers out and adjusts the strap of my mask instead, straightening it up from where it was crooked from leaning against him.
I exhale shakily and swim away from him a little ways, like a normal person, like I’m not someone whose wits were just addled from being so close to Dante Giliberti.
“Why aren’t you wearing a mask?” I ask.
My voice sounds a little nasally from my stupid face mask. I decide that I don’t want to look like Darth Vader and pull it off. I’m not going to be snorkeling anymore, anyway.
Dante smiles. “I’m not here to snorkel,” he tells me. “I came to find you.”
“How did you know where to look?” I ask.
He looks amused. “Really?” he asks wryly. “It’s one of the few perks of my dad’s job. I know everything that happens in Caberra.”
I narrow my eyes. “Do you have someone watching me?”
He looks guilty. “Um. I may have assigned one of my security guards to you. Just while you’re here, of course. I mean, you’re my responsibility and I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Because the crime rate here in paradise is
so high?” I ask, sarcasm dripping from my voice. Dante looks properly chastised and I have to admit, in a weird stalker way, it was a sweet thing that he did. I feel protected, anyway.