ZOEY DIDN’T GET AWAY FROM the restaurant till after ten o’clock, her apron stuffed with forty-two dollars in quarters, singles, and the occasional five-dollar bill. Her feet hurt from running and her back from hoisting heavy trays.
The night air was like a slap of cold water on her face. Getting away from the smell of food and beer and people’s cigarettes to breathe the fresh, salt air revived her. The thought of heading straight home to sit in her room or watch TV downstairs with Benjamin held no great attraction. Neither did the idea of going over to Nina and Claire’s house. The last thing she wanted was to face a cross-examination by Claire.
Instead she stayed on Dock Street as it curved along Town Beach, enjoying an unusually clear sky filled with stars. It was the sort of sky you saw in winter, when the sky got so clear and cold that it seemed like nothing lay between earth and empty space.
She reached the end of Dock, where it merged into Leeward. She’d expected to head over to Jake’s house, just a hundred feet away, a blaze of lights amid the pines. Instead she turned right, following the dark road that led to the breakwater.
There was a sign at the head of the sandy patch that connected the road to the breakwater, stating that no one was to be there after dark. The town had put up the sign after some tourist kids had been swept away by high surf and badly battered before they could be rescued. Naturally, no resident of the island paid the slightest attention. Unlike tourists, residents knew better than to parade around the breakwater when a freak summer storm was sending fifteen-foot waves crashing over it.
To the right, the bay was placid within the shelter of the breakwater. To the left, the sea kept up its relentless attack, churning and surging. Every so often it sent explosions of spray up into the air, carrying on the breeze as a salty dew that condensed on Zoey’s warm skin.
It was one of Zoey’s favorite places, a walk that never failed to affect her, at once deeply calming and exciting. The slowly flashing green light at the breakwater’s tip glowed like a firefly. Across the harbor, she could see light spilling from the restaurant she had just left. Up on the ridge she could pick out the lights from Aisha’s inn. And across the four miles of water, Weymouth.
But for Zoey, the better view was always the view north, straight out into a profound darkness unnaffected by man-made lights, indifferent even to the stars and the moon.
She neared the end of the breakwater before she saw him sitting on the wall, his legs hanging over the side, seemingly oblivious to the crash of waves at his feet. A fountain of spray erupted, drenching him in a salt shower. He tilted back his head and smoothed his hand over his hair.
Zoey stepped back, hoping to walk away before he noticed her.
“Too late, Zoey,” Lucas said. “I’ve watched you all the way from your folks’ restaurant.”
“I was just heading over to Jake’s house,” Zoey said, pointing, as if that would help convince him.
Lucas brought up his legs and stood, shaking his head to throw off a new dousing of water. “I saw you hesitate down at the crossroad. You like it out here? I do. It’s one of the places I kept thinking about while I was away. I kept thinking of a night just like this, and the smell of the sea.”
Zoey nodded. “It is nice out here.”
“You have no idea,” he said softly. “You’ve never had it taken away from you.”
“I guess you’re right.” She paused, gazed back over her shoulder at the lights of Jake’s house. “Well, I have to go.”
He fixed her with his gaze, curious, confused. Then he smiled a faint half-smile. “Oh. You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not. I mean, you and I used to be friends. You know, neighbors, anyway.”
“I used to bring my mom’s sweet rolls down and hang out with you and Ben and your mom for breakfast. Your dad would already be down at the restaurant. You’d be telling your mom about school, or what Nina said, or getting upset over the hole in the ozone or whatever.” Lucas looked at her and smiled. A real smile this time. “And your mom would be nodding and muttering uh-huh, having no idea what you were saying because she hadn’t had her first cup of coffee yet. Ben would be sitting there, pretending to read the newspaper upside down.” Lucas laughed at the memory. “Does he still pull stuff like that?”
Zoey smiled despite herself. “He’s added a few tricks. He walked into a classroom with a substitute teacher last year and acted like he thought he was in the boys’ bathroom. He pretended to believe the teacher’s desk was a urinal. The sub totally lost it.”
“Did he . . . ?”
“No. He’s not crude, just strange.”
“I always did like Ben. I always liked your whole family. You seemed so nice and normal to me.”
“Normal? I don’t know about normal. Personally, when I want normal, I go over to—” She fell silent and looked away.
“You can say Jake’s name,” Lucas said. “That feud is all one-way. I have nothing against Jake McRoyan, except that he hates my guts.”
Zoey glanced over her shoulder again, her heart fluttering. For the second time in two days, she found herself talking to her boyfriend’s greatest enemy.
“Did you tell Claire what I said?” Lucas asked.
Zoey shook her head. “Not exactly. I told Nina, though.” She looked down at his feet. “What did you mean about Claire didn’t have to worry, and you kept your promises?”
“Nothing,” Lucas said. “Old news, old history. We were kind of close before the accident, Claire and I.”
“I know. She’s going out with Benjamin now.”
“Poor Ben,” Lucas said.
“He doesn’t think so, I guess. They’ve been going out for a year almost.”
“And you’re still with good old Jake, huh?”
“Yes, still.” It was so odd, Zoey realized. Here she was, talking to Lucas as if he were a stranger. Except he was a stranger who knew all the people she knew, knew much of her life, her history. Sometimes when he spoke it was like the old times, an easy, familiar feel, as if he were still the same guy who dropped by for breakfast. Then, suddenly, she would remember what he had done, and why he had been away.
And why Jake, the guy who loved her, and whom she loved in return, so hated him.
“You’re looking confused,” Lucas said, reading her thoughts. “You don’t know how to treat me, do you? Am I the enemy? Or am I still a friend?”
“I guess I don’t know,” Zoey confessed.
“I know how I feel about it,” Lucas said. He turned to look off toward the town. Lights were being extinguished as North Harbor began to go to sleep. “When you’re locked up, you spend a lot of time with your memories. At first you tend to focus on all the bad stuff, like how it was you came to be locked up. But you can’t spend almost two years reliving the bad times. Eventually you start to remember all the good times. All the places you enjoyed. This place, for example. And all the people you cared for.” He looked at her again, his smoldering dark eyes wide and glittering with reflected moonlight. “I remembered Claire, yes. And Nina and Ben and Aisha. I remembered Wade, too. I even remembered all the times I was out with my dad, working, hauling up the lobster pots, him cursing at me in Portuguese. Even though they weren’t all happy memories, they were a million miles away from my cellmates and our cinder-block walls.” A dark shadow crossed his face, like clouds momentarily blotting out the moon. Then he looked up at her again, his expression peaceful.
“I also thought about you, Zoey. Strange, because I don’t think I’d ever paid much attention to you when we saw each other every day. I don’t know that I’d ever really seen you until that day when you . . . when you gave me that ice-cream cone. Still, I found my thoughts returning to you. I think in some way you came to represent everything that I had lost.”
Zoey’s throat had gone dry. She swallowed hard. A jet of spray shot up, landing as noisy rain in the space between them.
“Now you’re really worried, aren’t you?” Lucas said.
Zoey shook her head, not trusting her voice.
“It’s okay, I understand,” Lucas said. “Don’t take me too seriously. I’ve just been around guys who don’t talk much except in four-letter words and threats. And then there’s my folks. My dad hasn’t spoken a word to me. He’s forbidden my mother to speak, too, although once when he wasn’t around, she . . .” He stopped as his voice broke. He took several deep breaths. “Sorry. They say it takes a while to readjust to normal life. You’d better get going. This island is so small, somebody’s likely to see you.”
He was giving her the opportunity to leave. And that’s exactly what she should do, Zoey knew. This was Lucas. Lucas Cabral, the person responsible for Wade’s death.
More important, Jake, Claire—everyone—was determined to make Lucas a pariah. It was a matter of islander solidarity. And if they knew she was giving any sort of support to Lucas, she herself might be the next one cut out of the group.
“Go on, don’t feel bad about it,” Lucas said. “I know how it is.”
Zoey nodded and turned away. She took a half-dozen steps before she turned back. “Lucas!” she yelled.
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t you stop by for breakfast sometime?”
“Why don’t you stop by for breakfast?” Zoey muttered into the darkness of her room. Was she nuts? Was she coming unglued? Was she absolutely begging for trouble? She tossed in the bed, flipping from her left side to her right side, scrunching the pillow up under her head.
Not enough that she had talked to him, no, not nearly enough. Jake might have forgiven that. After all, he knew she was no good at being mean to people. But no, she’d had to go that one step further. She’d had to make the leap from dumb, but we can overlook it to what on earth were you thinking?
Still, Lucas had seemed so sad. Sad and alone and . . . well, face it, kind of gorgeous, if you liked guys with smoldering, melancholy eyes. What was she supposed to do? Add to his sadness? Stomp on his sort of sexy vulnerability? What if he’d gone out to the breakwater thinking about suicide? What if it was like the guy in that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, that Christmas movie where the guy was getting ready to kill himself and the angel came along to rescue him at the last minute? What if the angel had said Screw you, pal, no one wants you around?
It would have been a very different movie.
And it really had nothing to do with the fact that Lucas had great dark eyes.
Nothing.
She was just being nice.
See, Jake had great eyes, too. And Jake didn’t end up going to reform school.
Whereas Lucas probably hadn’t even seen a girl for two years.
She threw back her covers and twisted her Boston Bruins shirt she was wearing back around. She went to the cramped desk in the dormer window and looked for a while down the street, dark under an overcast sky.
She snapped on the little brass light mounted on the wall and sat down, pulling out her journal. She found the paper clip that marked the end of her last version of the romance novel and checked the draft number. Picking up her pen, she wrote:
Chapter One—Draft #23
She’d been wrong all along, she realized. It shouldn’t be a story about the lusty yet virginal maiden who is carried off by the lusty, fiery, yet strangely sensitive knight, Viking, or prince. It should be a story about the same knight, only he was lying wounded, nearly dead after a terrible battle. He’d been wandering lost, perhaps not even knowing who he truly was anymore. Wandering lost, bloody, thirsty, hungry, and alone.
He would wander into the maiden’s village, where she lived with her ancient, gnarled uncle after her entire family had been killed by marauding barbarians.
The very barbarians who had wounded the knight. That way there would be a connection between the two.
The maiden would take him into her humble, historically accurate yet clean house and lay him tenderly on her straw mattress. She would remove his armor, piece by piece, and hide it in the woods, so if the barbarians came looking for the knight they wouldn’t know it was him.
What would he have on under the armor?
A leather jerkin. Whatever that was. But that would have to be removed, too. And the wound would have to be cleaned and bandaged. And the rest of him would have to be cleaned as well. After all, dried blood and so on.
Then she’d spoon-feed him some soup. He’d thank her and ask her name, which would be . . . Meghan. Or Raven. Or Chastity.
Chastity for now, anyway. Later, when the knight recovered . . .
Zoey put down her pen and sat back in her chair. She had covered three and a half pages with her looping, disorganized handwriting, but now a wave of sudden sleepiness reminded her that it was, after all, the middle of the night.
She snapped off her light and went back to her bed.
She was letting her imagination run away with her, something it often did. All that had happened was she’d spent a few minutes talking to Lucas on the breakwater. It didn’t mean anything. Besides, he’d said he remembered her as skinny.
He’d also said she represented everything he’d lost. What did he mean by that?
And why did she care?
Zoey fell asleep with that question running slower and slower around in her mind. And the memory of Lucas’s eyes.