Tempest Rising (4 page)

And yet, I couldn’t force myself to move, to let him go. The chill of his body against mine was no match for the ice scraping me raw from the inside out: frigid, frozen, frightening as hell. I’d like to blame it on my near-death experience, but once again, that would be a lie. The iciness had been growing in me for a while, getting a little worse every day until I swore I could feel my humanity slowly freezing beneath the onslaught.

My knees trembled.

I rested against Mark for as long as I dared—until my teeth were chattering and I was sure my lips were the same color as the Pacific. Then I took one last sniff, one last moment of comfort, and pulled away.

“Look, I gotta go in,” I told him, working to keep my voice even.

“I know.” Once again, his lips turned up in that bad-boy grin of his—the one that had first attracted me because it was so very different from my own restrained smile—and he said, “Are you going to make an appointment with the doctor? Get checked out?”

“No!” It was almost a shout and I felt guilty when I saw him rear back in surprise. But going to the doctor meant telling my dad and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—put him through that. Not now, when my seventeenth birthday loomed over the house like a particularly unwelcome specter.

I worked to soften my voice. “I’m fine. Just a little shaken up.”

“Tempest.” He didn’t look convinced.

I shook my head, utterly exhausted by the whole situation. “I can’t do this now, Mark.”

His jaw tightened and as I stared at him I realized, with more than a little shock, that he wasn’t going to let this go. Not now. Not this time.

“It’s never
now
, Tempest. That’s the whole problem.” His hands clenched into fists. “You always put me off, always tell me we’ll talk about it later. But we never do.”

“Mark.” I reached out, put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s comp—”

He shrugged off my hand. “Don’t tell me it’s complicated. I’m not an idiot. And don’t just ignore me like you usually do.” He glanced over his shoulder at the ocean, and for the first time that I could remember, he looked angry. Really angry. “Do you actually think I’m so stupid that I don’t know something weird happened out there? Something screwed up?”

My stomach tightened. “I don’t know what you mean. The wave—”

“Yeah, right. The wave.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his board shorts and stared at me with an intensity that had my heart threatening to pound right out of my chest. “The day a wave like that knocks you around is the day I eat my freakin’ surfboard. I’m not an idiot, Tempest.”

“I never said you were.”

“Of course not. You just treat me like I am.”

“I
really
don’t want to talk about this.” I forced the words past my still-tight throat.

“Well, I do.” His jaw was clenched, his eyes a deep, molten chocolate. “You tell everyone I’m your boyfriend. You tell
me
that you’re crazy about me. But you don’t trust me for shit.”

“That’s not true,” I insisted, with a lot more confidence than I was feeling.

“No?” he asked. “Then prove it.” Yanking his hands out of his pockets, he wrapped them around my upper arms and shook me a little. “Tell me what happened out there. Tell me why you won’t talk to me. Tell me what’s going on with you—for once. Do I have to beg?”

He wasn’t rough, but pain shot down my arms at the first squeeze of his fingers. It took my breath, had me struggling for air for the second time that morning.

“Nothing’s going on,” I repeated, but I could barely choke out the lie. I was disgusted—with myself, with him, with the whole crazy situation. And it pissed me off that he was pushing me to talk to him about stuff even I didn’t understand.

I fought to keep the anger out of my voice as I glanced over his shoulder at the ocean that had just begun to roar and thrash. Storms were rare on this stretch of beach, even in winter. But when the Pacific decided to put on a show, it did it with a lot of style. “Besides, we don’t have time for this. If you don’t beat the rain home, you’ll be screwed. Traffic—”

He dropped my arms like I’d burned him, started to back away even as he stared at me incredulously. “That’s it? Seriously? ‘Go home, Mark, it’s going to rain’?”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” Frustration had tears burning behind my eyes.

“Bull. You know exactly what I want from you. You just don’t want to give it to me.” He bent down, picked up his board. Started to walk away.

Shame skated through me. No matter how annoyed I was at him, I didn’t want him to leave—not like this. Not when he was this upset with me. Mark was the best, most normal thing in my life, and the thought of losing him …

“Mark. Please.” I crossed the distance between us at a run, threw my arms around him, and held on tight. It was another shock to realize he was shaking even worse than I was.

Standing on tiptoes, I started to brush my lips across his in a soft, comforting kiss. But he wasn’t looking for comfort, or for softness. Dropping his surfboard on the pavement once again, he fastened his hands on my shoulders and pulled me closer to him with an urgency I’d never felt before. And in that one instant, the kiss I had meant to reassure turned into so much more.

As his lips moved against mine, I could feel his worry and his desperation. His driving need not to let me out of his sight. And though I told myself I wanted nothing more than to get away, I couldn’t help responding to him.

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I kissed him until both of us were breathing funny and my legs were once again threatening to go out from under me.

Kissed him until I could barely remember my own name, let alone everything I had to face in the next few weeks.

Kissed him until nothing mattered but the two of us and the way we made each other feel.

And then he was pulling away, grabbing his board and heading down my driveway with a stride that said he was still angry. Still hurt.

“This isn’t over, Tempest.” He tossed the words over his shoulder. “Not by a long shot.”

As I watched him go, I wondered if it ever would be.

Chapter 3

I stared after Mark until he was little more than a speck on the horizon, so many emotions bouncing around inside of me that I didn’t know which ones to concentrate on. Fear, worry, disgust, anger, desire, confusion, love. They mixed together until I wanted to scream.

But since that wasn’t an option—at least not at seven a.m. on my sleepy little street—I tried to put our fight out of my mind as I grabbed my board and headed up the driveway. As I walked, I stared at the huge steel and glass house I’d lived in my entire life.

My dad had designed it for my mom right after they’d found out she was pregnant with me; to this day, he swore it had been a wedding present for her (yes, she was pregnant when they got married), but I knew the truth.

This house, the only one of its kind in the neighborhood, was just one more of my father’s desperate, pathetic attempts to prove to my mother that she wasn’t trapped. I guess he’d figured if every room in the house had at least one whole wall of glass that overlooked the ocean, she wouldn’t feel landlocked, wouldn’t feel cornered.

He’d been wrong—but then, when it came to Mom, he’d been wrong about a lot of things. We both had. Nice to know I was continuing the family tradition in my relationship with Mark.

Furious with myself and my too-pushy boyfriend, I dropped my board on its stand in the garage—right next to my father’s—and headed into the backyard to the shower Dad had had installed next to the back door, so we didn’t track sand from the beach all over the floors inside.

As I showered in the hottest water my sensitive skin could stand, I did my best to block out the roars of the omnipresent ocean. I wasn’t successful—I never was—and after I’d wrapped myself up in the fluffy black robe I always kept near the shower, I wandered into the house and down the hall to the kitchen where I poured myself some pineapple juice. Then I stood at the huge, seamless pane of glass that ran the full length of the room, sipping my juice and watching as the Pacific whipped itself into a frenzy.

Under my gaze, waves crashed and rolled, kicked up spray and churned the ever-changing surface of the ocean into shapeless foam. The water was darker now, more gray than blue, and I shivered as I watched the rain roll in. It was a good thing I hadn’t been out there as the storm approached—I might never have made it back to the surface.

Lightning flashed above the water and I felt it inside of me, felt its call as surely as if it had said my name. It wrapped itself around me—around my heart, my body, my very soul—and tugged until I didn’t know if I could resist it.

Didn’t know if I wanted to resist it—even after everything that had happened.

The thought had ice slamming through me all over again, as if the hot shower and heavy robe had never happened. As if my father didn’t have the thermostat set at eighty-two in a last-ditch effort to keep me warm.

“Tempest, can I have pancakes for breakfast?” My eight-year-old brother’s voice intruded on my pity party.

“It’s too late for pancakes, dork. You slept in.” I turned in time to watch my thirteen-year-old brother, Rio, shove our younger brother, Moku, into a kitchen cabinet, hard.

For a second it looked like Moku was going to object—his lower lip quivered with the need to cry foul—but in the end he kept the pain to himself. Like he always did, as if he was afraid no one would be there to kiss it away.

It wasn’t hard to figure out where his neuroses came from.

My heart hurt for him, this kid whom I had had such a big hand in raising. Nine years younger than me, he’d been two when my mom had ditched us and my dad had fallen apart. If this thing happened, if I ended up like my mother, what was going to happen to him? Who would take him to school and read him a book before bed and cuddle with him in the middle of the night?

Who was going to defend him from Rio, who took a savage delight in torturing him whenever our father’s back was turned?

“Cut it out,” I told Rio as I reached into the fridge for the lunches I’d packed for them the night before.

“Cut what out?” His face was the picture of innocence.

“You know what.” To make sure he got my meaning, I knocked into him with my shoulder as I crossed to the table.

“There’s cereal for breakfast, Mo. But I’ll make pancakes for dinner, how’s that sound?”

“Yummy!”

Behind him Rio made a gagging sound, but I chose to ignore him. It was that or start the morning with yet another fight.

“Why do you have to be such a dork?” Rio asked Moku with a big-brother smirk.

“Why do you have to be so mean?”

“I’m not mean, just honest.”

“Knock it off.” My dad breezed into the kitchen, dressed in his normal work attire of board shorts and an electric yellow surfing tee. Looking at him like that, it was hard to imagine he was the president of a company that had worked its way onto the Fortune 1000 list three years before and was steadily rising in the ranks. “Morning, Tempest.”

“Morning, Dad.”

“How were the waves today?”

“Good.” I concentrated on pouring Mo his Froot Loops and prayed my dad wouldn’t notice the tension in my voice.

“Really?” He was looking out to sea. “Looks kind of rough.”

“That just kicked up,” Rio said quickly, his mouth full of Cocoa Pebbles. “It was pretty calm earlier.”

I glanced at him, saw him staring at the waves with a concerned look that was at odds with his normally obnoxious behavior. And suddenly I knew he’d seen what had happened—had watched from his room as I’d almost drowned.

No wonder he was being a bigger pain in the butt than usual. He must have been panicked—we might not always get along, but we stick together. After Mom left, we’d had little choice.

I tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at me.

“Good.” My dad kept watching the waves and I tried to pretend I didn’t know what he was looking for. But that was just one more lie—he was looking for the same thing he was always looking for: my mother. Too bad he hadn’t figured out what the rest of us had: that after six years, it was pretty much a lost cause to expect her to swim on home and take up where she’d left off.

Finally, he forcibly jerked his attention away from the window and focused on us instead. “Tests today?”

“Spelling,” Moku said proudly.

“You know your words?”

“Tempest quizzed me last night. I got them all right.”

My dad shot me a grateful look. Moku had ADHD and was in the middle of being tested for dyslexia. Trying to get him to spell words was more painful than having your wisdom teeth yanked out—without anesthesia. My dad tried to work with him too, but it was rough going. Mo just responded better to me.

One more reason this whole nightmarish birthday thing just plain sucked.

“I’ve got a math test today,” Rio volunteered. “I’m going to ace it.”

“You studied?” my father asked incredulously and I couldn’t blame him. Rio was about as interested in school as I was in quantum physics.