The Light and Fallen (17 page)

She was surprised when she pulled into the
driveway. She was barely able to remember how she got there, and
she had forgotten all about Dina's kitchen scales.

"Did you have fun?" Desiree asked. She
reminded Jack of a cat. She was sitting with her legs crossed at
the knee, but her top foot was rocking rapidly, revealing her
agitation.

"Of course," he said. He walked past her to
the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of orange juice. He tipped
his head back and took a large swig straight from the carton.

"I don't know what purpose you think this is
going to serve, toying with a little girl. It's really beneath
you."

"I'm bored," Jack said. He threw the carton
back onto the shelf and let the door to the fridge slam shut.
"She's the perfect diversion, and it will drive Lucian mad.

"Can you believe," he grumbled, "that after
all that I
still
had to persuade her to come to the party
with me. I thought she'd be falling into my arms, but no.
Apparently only the Dominion is good enough for her."

"Well thank Abbadon she agreed to go,"
Desiree said, "because I don't think I could stand any more of your
sad little planning and plotting. Take her out, see if she's
anything special at all, which I doubt, and then maybe you can get
over it."

"I still think you're jealous," Jack teased.
He saw her foot jerk angrily in response. "You don't have to worry.
There's no one quite like you."

Desiree narrowed her eyes. "What about you?"
she jabbed. "Even if you can make her like you, you'll always know
you were second best."

Jack growled at her but she ignored him. She
grabbed her cell phone and threw it at his head, chuckling as he
swiped it out of the air. "Guess you better call the caterer," she
said. "You've got a party to plan."

Samara was in bed when the phone rang. The
digital readout on her alarm clock told her that it was 11:45. She
grabbed for the phone before it could ring a second time and
pressed it to her ear. "What is it?" she mumbled. "I'm going to see
you in like eight hours."

She burrowed into her pillow, expecting words
to begin pouring into her ear, but heard only silence. "Carin?
Hello?"

She was shocked to hear Lucian's voice, low
and urgent. "Don't go out with him."

Almost six weeks had passed since he last
spoke to her, but the sound of his voice brought back every bit of
desire that had been so thinly buried. She clutched the phone in
shock, not even able to register the words he was saying until he
repeated them. "Samara? Did you hear me? Please don't go out with
him."

She struggled to pair the words with the
burning hope that he was calling because he missed her. "What?"

"I know Jack asked you out," Lucian said.
"I'm begging you not to go."

"How do you know?" she asked. Her voice was
blurry with sleep, and she shook her head in confusion. "I haven't
told anyone."

"I just do," he answered, "and this is a
mistake."

She waited for him to say more, but as the
seconds ticked by she sat up in the bed. She was coming to the slow
realization that he wasn't calling to apologize for his behavior,
or to ask for forgiveness, or declare his feelings for her. He
wasn't doing any of the things she had imagined since they last
spoke.

Disappointment crashed over her
. He's not
calling because he misses me
, she thought. Her mind flashed to
Jack, overflowing with smooth charisma, and she felt a spark of
indignant fury ignite within her. This wasn't about her at all. It
was about the stupid rivalry he had with his stepbrother.

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" she
spat into the phone. "How dare you call me in the middle of the
night and tell me what to do!"

"You shouldn't do this," he pressed. "He's
pulling you into something that has nothing to do with you. Call
him. Tell him you've changed your mind."

"No!" she sputtered furiously. She tried to
keep her voice low so she wouldn't wake Dina, but it grew louder as
she spoke. "I'm so stupid! I was thinking that you were calling to
tell me that you missed me, that you realized you were wrong, but
you're just calling because you're jealous. You made your choice to
be out of my life completely. Now stay out!"

She was trembling with rage when she slammed
the phone down, and she pummeled her pillow with her fists. When
she stopped she was panting heavily, and she closed her eyes and
tried to slow her heartbeat. She was in the middle of her second
deep breath when the phone rang again. She stared down at it in
disbelief
. Surely
, she thought,
he's not stupid enough to
call me back.

She grabbed the phone in the middle of the
second ring. Her heart was still racing and she could feel a flush
of heat roll from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
"Hello?"

"I'm sorry," Lucian said insistently. "I know
this seems inappropriate and hurtful, but I'm begging you to trust
me. He's playing you."

Samara felt hot pinpricks behind her eyelids
as tears rushed in. "Why is it so hard for you to believe that
someone else might want me?"

Lucian sighed. "I don't find it hard to
believe someone would want you," he said. "I find it hard to
believe that more people aren't falling over themselves to get to
you because you're a captivating person. But Jack doesn't want you.
He's trying to find a way to get to me, and he knows you mean more
to me than anything else in the world."

Samara pressed the heel of her hand against
her eyes and tried to keep the tears from spilling over. "That's
obviously not true," she said. She cursed silently as she heard her
voice crack. "If you cared about me, then you wouldn't do this to
me. You wouldn't call me in the middle of the night and try to keep
a hold on me when I'm doing my best to let you go."

She realized that she felt exhausted. All of
her anger evaporated, leaving a gaping pain in its place. "I can't
talk to you any more," she whispered. "It hurts too much. If you
ever cared about me, even as just a friend, please don't call me
again." She pressed the end button on the phone and lay back
against her pillow. Tears burned their way down her cheeks, and she
stared at the ceiling until she finally fell into a restless
sleep.

The memory of Lucian's late night call
overshadowed any lingering reservations Samara had about dating
Jack. She thought about Lucian more than ever, and when she closed
her eyes at night it was his face, not Jack's, that she saw, but
she refused to yield to her feelings or his request. Instead, she
drew a perverse satisfaction from the knowledge that it bothered
him.

She still felt some reluctance about going
out with Jack, because on a deep level she felt that it was wrong
to go out with one person when your heart was with another, but she
shoved those scruples aside. Any thoughts she'd entertained about
calling off the date or pretending she was sick were out of the
question. If she didn't go now, then Lucian would think it was
because of him. There was no way she was going to give him that
satisfaction.

The rest of the week flew by, almost as if
the time had a mind of its own. Samara stood in front of her closet
on Saturday evening and assessed her wardrobe with a critical eye.
She hadn't worried about what she was going to wear when she went
out with Lucian. She had been so consumed with eagerness to be with
him that the clothes she wore were almost an afterthought. Going
out with Jack was an entirely different scenario.

Samara mentally ran down the list of girls he
had dated since he started at West Wimberley. They were all
thinner, taller, and to her eye, more beautiful. If she wasn't at
least dressed well, then everyone at the party would be wondering
why, after so many weeks, Jack had chosen to date her.
Who am I
kidding?
she thought, as she looked around her bedroom in
frustration an hour later. Discarded clothes draped across her bed
and pooled onto the floor, and her closet was nearly empty.
They're going to be wondering why he would ever go out with me
anyway.

She was sweaty and disheveled from pulling
outfits on and off, and she felt totally out of her league. She
sank to the floor cross legged and desperately wished that Carin
and Bethanny hadn't gone out of town for the holidays. There was
only one person left to ask for advice. "Mom!" she called. "Can you
hear me?"

"What are you doing?" Dina asked. She stuck
her head into the room and looked at Samara sitting on the floor,
and then at the clothes strewn around the room with a bemused
expression.

"I have a date tonight." Samara picked up an
overturned shoe that was near her and tossed it toward the closet.
"I would say I have nothing to wear, but that's obviously not
true."

"Is it with Lucian? I thought something had
happened between the two of you."

"No," Samara said. She felt a stab of pain as
she remembered the exhilaration she'd felt the day after
Homecoming, before she knew Lucian was going to remove himself from
her life, and felt renewed determination to look incredible. Forget
him, she told herself. She stuffed his memory back into the corners
of her heart. You're going out with Jack, and you're going to have
a great time if it kills you! "It's someone different," she said.
"Someone from school."

"Anyone I know?" Dina asked.

Samara shook her head. "No, he's new this
year."

She wanted to avoid giving her mother any
more information. She had a sense that Dina would disapprove if she
knew the whole story. Instead, she opened her arms wide and
gestured to the piles of clothes. "Help!" she pleaded.

Together they picked out a pair of dark
washed jeans and a fitted black sweater that brought out her eyes.
Samara slipped on a pair of black ankle boots and hung a delicate
silver bracelet on her wrist. "You look beautiful," Dina said as
she evaluated the final look in the mirror on the back of her
closet door. "It's hard to believe you used to be my baby
girl."

Samara swallowed a lump in her throat as she
looked at her mom's reflection in the mirror. "I'm still your
girl." She wrapped her arms around mother and let her head rest on
her shoulder. She breathed in Dina's familiar scent as she stroked
her hair. "We've got to stick together, right?"

Dina stepped back and held onto Samara's
shoulders. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"Of course!" Samara lied. She turned her back
to her mother and started picking up the discarded clothes and
bringing them back to the closet. "Why wouldn't I be?" She rested
her hand on the door frame and stared into the dark closet as she
waited for a response.

"Besides the obvious reasons," Dina said,
"you look more resigned than happy right now, and that concerns me.
If you don't want to talk I respect that, but I'm always here for
you."

Samara bit her lip. She was tempted to pour
out her heart to her mother, but then she changed her mind. There
was no point in rehashing what had happened with Lucian or the way
she felt empty without him, no point in talking about how she
missed his conversation and his touch so much that it was a
physical ache. There was nothing her mom could say or do to make
her feel better about being in love with someone who didn't love
her back. She clenched her fingers around the edge of the door and
shook her head, afraid that her voice would betray her if she tried
to speak.

She heard movement behind her as her mother
picked up a few shirts from the floor and tossed them onto her bed.
"Just be sure you're doing what you feel is right," Dina said. "And
that you're doing it for the right reasons." She walked over and
touched Samara's shoulder for a moment before she went out the
door.

Samara felt a rebellious tear spill over onto
her cheek and wiped it away as she turned to study her face in the
mirror. The eyes that stared back at her were red and hollow. She
had cried more in the past year than she had in her entire life,
and she wasn't sure how to stop.

Unbidden, Lucian's voice echoed in her mind.
"He's playing you…he doesn't want you." She shoved his negative
words angrily aside and shook her long, thick hair out of its
ponytail, letting it flow around her face and fan across her
shoulders. Lucian was wrong. She might not be the prettiest girl at
the party tonight, but she was sure she'd be the only one Jack had
asked out three times.

She didn't know what Jack's intentions were,
or if he was nice, or what his history was with Lucian. She didn't
know, and she didn't care. He had chosen her, and for tonight that
was enough.

Samara realized that she had gotten dressed
too early. She still had hours to wait before Jack came to pick her
up. She finished cleaning her room, and then pulled a novel off the
shelf. She hoped that reading something might distract her. Her
eyes moved over the words and her fingers turned the pages, but the
ideas refused to stay in her mind. She felt empty, as blank as an
unwritten page. By the time Jack finally knocked on her door she
had passed 100 pages. She felt slightly calmer, and although she
was still inwardly divided about going out with him, she was
determined not to let it show.

She pasted a huge smile on her face before
she swung open the front door and greeted Jack with an enthusiasm
that she didn't feel. "Hi!" she gushed, "I'm so glad you're
here!"

Jack opened his arms to give her a quick hug
and she stepped into his body and wrapped her arms around his
shoulders. Their embrace only lasted a moment, but as she pressed
into his chest she could feel the hardness of his body beneath her
cheek. Jack stepped back and twirled her in a circle as he ran his
eyes over her. "You look stunning," he said.