Every Wild Heart Page 19

  She noticed Lucas, still standing by the aisle gate. He looked different. Nic couldn’t put her finger on it, but something in his expression had changed.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL they’d driven all the way back to Bernal Heights that Lucas told her what he was thinking. He turned off the car engine. It was eleven o’clock at night. Nic’s mom would be home from the studio in an hour. Lucas leaned his head back against the seat and turned to face her. She felt as though she could sit there looking into his dark eyes forever.

  “I can’t believe I thought you were pretty before,” he said then. He seemed mildly disgusted with himself.

  Nic felt her chest constrict painfully. She looked down into her lap, blinking.

  “Oh, no,” he said, straightening in the seat. He lifted her chin so that she looked at him again. “That came out wrong. You are so beautiful, Nic. I’ve known that from the first moment that I saw you in the cafeteria. It’s impossible to look at you and not see that you’re beautiful. Your beauty is a fact. It’s like . . .” He broke his eyes away from hers and glanced through the car window. “It’s like that stop sign. It just is. It’s there. You can’t deny it exists because it’s right in front of you, stopping you.”

  Nic felt her mouth twitch into a smile. “My beauty is like that stop sign?”

  Lucas looked at her so intently that her smile fell away. “I used to think so,” he said. “But then I saw you tonight, riding that horse, and now . . . it’s not just that I see how beautiful you are. Now I see the things that you can’t see just by looking at you.” He reached out and took her hands in his. “You amazed me tonight. You shouldn’t let your mom tell you that you can’t ride Peach. You shouldn’t let her control you. This is your life.”

  He leaned his head toward hers and kissed her. When they parted, Nic felt breathless. He held his arms around her. She rested her chin on his shoulder, felt the side of his face against the side of her face. He smelled good. She breathed him in.

  “We seem to have a thing for cars,” she said. She felt his smile against the side of her cheek.

  “I’d have a thing for you anywhere.”

  She pulled away and looked at him. “Let’s test that theory,” she said, and invited him inside.

  For a moment she thought he might say no.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. She told him that she was.

  They helped each other over the eight-foot fences, darting through the neighbors’ yards, unsuccessfully trying to stifle their laughter as the neighbor’s motion-activated floodlights blinded them. They arrived, breathless, at Nic’s back door.

  “Never a dull moment with you, Clement,” Lucas said, grinning.

  Now that she felt comfortable touching him, she couldn’t seem to stop. She kissed him. “We seem to have a thing for yards, too,” she said when they separated again. She pulled up a loose brick from the patio and plucked the back door key from its hiding place. Inside, she had trouble thinking of anything but the pressure of his hand on her lower back, and fumbled with the alarm code.

  They moved from room to room, holding hands and kissing.

  “We seem to have a thing for kitchens,” Nic said, laughing.

  “We seem to have a thing for couches,” Lucas said.

  “We seem to have a thing for hallways,” Nic said.

  When he finally left through the back door, she had just enough time to shower off her horse scent before her mother came home from the studio. Nic was so exhausted that she almost fell asleep with the hot water streaming over her, her muscles sore from riding, her lips tender from Lucas’s kisses.

  Chapter 17

  You appear to be in tip-top shape, young lady!” Dr. Feldman said, looking over the results of the series of exams that Nic had taken that morning.

  Nic looked at me, her eyes bright. I knew exactly what she was thinking, knew exactly the question that was poised on her tongue. But I had my own questions, and I beat her to the punch.

  “Is it possible that these tests could miss something? That there could be a lingering injury or change that you can’t see on a scan?”

  “It’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely. The results show that the swelling in Nic’s brain has completely dissipated.” Dr. Feldman looked back and forth between us. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nic still isn’t . . . quite herself.” I turned to Nic. “You’d agree, wouldn’t you? It’s important that Dr. Feldman has all of the information.”

  “Sure,” Nic said agreeably. I was relieved that she didn’t seem bothered that I’d brought up the subject. I’d noticed that she’d been trying and failing to suppress a smile all morning. My best guess—since she only pressed her lips together and shrugged when I asked about her buoyant mood in the car—was that she expected Dr. Feldman would give her clearance to ride.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little more, Nic?” Dr. Feldman prodded.

  She puffed out her bottom lip, thinking. “I guess it’s mostly that the things that used to worry me, or scare me, don’t anymore. I remember how I used to feel, but I don’t feel that way now.”

  “It’s the not-being-scared part that worries me,” I said. “She had an incident at school where she stole a—”

  “Mom!” Nic interrupted. “You said you yourself did plenty of things when you were—”

  “But I was a very different girl than you are, Nic, and—”

  “Maybe we’re not as different as you think,” my daughter said. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest in a way that suggested they might never uncross again.

  “That might be, but I still want to be sure you’re not at risk of doing something dangerous. If your doctor thinks there’s anything we can or should be doing to alleviate some of the personality—”

  “I just want to ride again!” Nic’s voice cut into the room, urgent and sharp. Dr. Feldman had been flicking his gaze back and forth between us, but now it landed squarely on Nic. “I remember the accident now, Dr. Feldman.” She told the doctor what she had already told me—she’d ridden Tru into the woods despite Denny’s warning and tried to jump over a fallen tree. “Since I remember, that means I’m healed, right? I can go back to riding horses now?”

  The doctor sighed. “I can only repeat what I have said before: a second head injury would likely have more serious repercussions than the first. Your scan looks good, Nic. You’re healed. What you do with your healed brain is up to you and your parents.”

  Nic beamed triumphantly. She turned to look at me. I wondered if she’d even heard what Dr. Feldman had said about the risks of a second injury. I could hardly believe what I was about to say, but what could I do? Take away the thing that she loved most in the world? I had a terrible feeling that if she were able to choose how she would die, she would choose dying on horseback in the same way that I might choose dying listening to music. In the end, of course, this didn’t matter at all. We didn’t get to choose how we died, only how we lived.

  “Okay,” I told her. “You can ride Tru tomorrow. I’ll go with you.”

  For a split second, she hesitated, and in that moment I immediately regretted my decision. Had she, somewhere deep inside, hoped I’d refuse? But then she was hugging me tightly, and there was nothing more I could possibly say.

  ON THE DRIVE to the barn on Saturday, Nic kept shifting in the passenger seat, too excited to sit still. Her energy only fed my own nerves—I was still uncertain about my decision to let her ride . . . and I was also nervous about seeing Denny. We’d spoke a few times that week, but it had seemed to me that our conversations had become stilted since our date. I wondered whether being face-to-face would make things between us more or less awkward.

  It turned out that in the week since I’d been to the barn, fall had arrived. Sometimes it took leaving the city to notice these things. The long dirt drive to the barn was speckled with fallen yellow leaves; the bright sunlight reflecting off of them made the driveway seem to glow. I parked and opened the door, surprised by the chill in the air
. I would have liked to have taken a moment to enjoy the beautiful day and the view of bright green pastures that surrounded us, but Nic was already jogging away from the car, so I hurried after her into the barn.

  “Hey, Nic!” one of the barn hands called down the aisle. “Denny asked you to go find him at home when you got here.”

  Nic was having trouble containing herself. Her boots were clicking an eager tap dance against the aisle’s stone floor. “Can you get Denny?” she asked me. “I’ll start grooming and tacking up.”

  I was happy for the excuse to be able to see where I stood with Denny without Nic watching. “Just don’t get on until we’re back . . .” I called after Nic, but she’d already ducked into the tack room.

  I left the barn and followed the dirt driveway toward Denny’s house. His boots stood guard by the door. I knocked and he appeared in the doorframe moments later, a silver thermos in his hand.

  “Hey, G.G.” he said. The ease and warmth of his voice immediately relieved me. “I ran out of coffee at the barn and had to come home for a refill. Would you like some?”

  “Sure.” I pulled off my boots and padded into the house after him.

  In the kitchen, Denny reached high into a cabinet for another thermos, his faded flannel shirt stretching across his back. “Milk? Sugar? Chocolate?” he asked.

  I smiled, remembering his sweet tooth. “Black is fine.” He handed me the thermos, and I took a sip of the hot, strong coffee. “That’s delicious. Thanks.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really? I’d add milk and sugar to milk and sugar if I could.” As if to emphasize his point, he lifted the top off the sugar pot and popped a sugar cube into his mouth, smiling as he crunched into it. He held up the pot, wiggled it. “I can’t tempt you?”

  “You can, actually,” I said. I plucked a cube of sugar from the pot and dropped it into my mouth.

  I could have sworn his eyes twinkled with delight as he crunched through that sugar cube. There was so much that I still didn’t know about him, so much that I wanted, I realized, to know. I felt a mix of excitement and impatience. Was it really possible that I hadn’t felt this way since Tyler? I’d had so many first and second and third dates, countless fizzled flirtations . . . all that time waiting to feel as strongly as I felt about a man who had been happily remarried for years.

  I felt Denny watching me. He cleared his throat. “Last weekend—”

  “I know,” I cut in, shaking my head. “It was all going so well, and then I said some things that I shouldn’t have said.”

  He leaned back against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms. “I got the impression that you’re hung up on someone else.”

  “I’m sorry.” I managed to suppress the urge to walk over to him and uncross his arms. “I used to be hung up on someone else. My ex-husband. It wasn’t my decision to get a divorce. But we did, nine years ago, and he’s been remarried for a long time. I’d like to meet someone else. I’m open to it. I just haven’t.”

  Denny smiled, lines deepening around his blue eyes. “Until now.”

  I couldn’t stop myself: I set the coffee thermos on the counter, walked over to him, uncrossed his arms, and held onto his hands. “Until now.”

  He looked down at me for a beat of time, and then in a remarkably deft move, he turned both of us around so that I was the one leaning against the counter. He burrowed his fingers into my hair, holding my gaze just long enough that I felt a shiver of anticipation run down the length of my spine. And then he kissed me. His hands moved down my back, pulling me toward him. The space between our bodies melted away. He lifted me onto the counter and I wrapped my legs around him. I felt hungry for him . . . it was nearly impossible to pull away. But I did, finally.

  The way he looked at me, his gaze liquid with desire, almost made me forget why I’d stopped. But then understanding flooded his face.

  “Nic,” he said.

  I nodded. “She’s at the barn, waiting for us.”

  Denny took a deep breath. He leaned in and gave me one final kiss and I took hold of his shirt to make it last longer.

  “I wanted to do that last week,” he said when he pulled away. “But you ran out of here too quickly.”

  “I won’t make that mistake again.” I slid, reluctantly, off the counter.

  Denny moved his hand over his face, as though trying to readjust to the light in the kitchen. I was beginning to see that the gesture was a habit for him; he managed to make it seem vaguely philosophical. “So this is the big day. Nic must be excited.”

  “Do you remember those little rubber Super Balls?”

  He squinted at me. “Sure. I had a collection of them when I was a kid.”

  “Imagine one bouncing around a small city house—off the walls, off the stairs, off your face at six o’clock in the morning. That has been Nic today.”

  He smiled. Desire still warmed the air between us, pulling us toward each other. He wrapped his arms around me again. “She’s a great rider,” he said in my ear. “She’s going to be okay.”

  Despite Denny’s reassurance, I felt an uncertainty that bordered on dread building within me as we headed back toward the barn. When we arrived, the aisle was empty. Tru was still in his stall. I checked for Nic in the tack room and she wasn’t there. When I stepped back into the aisle, Denny was staring at an open stall across from Tru’s.

  A young man suddenly sprinted into view at the open door at the far end of the aisle. “Denny!” he yelled. “You better come quick!”

  FOR A MOMENT, from the edge of the barn looking down toward the large ring, it could have been any pissed-off horse and determined rider. But then the familiarity of the rider’s dark hair, her tall, thin body leaning as the horse bucked and twisted below her, registered like a slap.

  “Nic!” I cried, and began to run toward the ring.

  Denny grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he said. “Just walk. We don’t want to spook Peach . . . or distract Nic.”

  The name Peach rang an alarm. Wasn’t that the horse Denny had been talking about last weekend? The one he’d said was dangerous? I sucked in a frightened breath.

  “She’s okay,” Denny murmured as we moved toward the ring. “She’s stuck on that horse like a tick.”

  Nic was cantering the horse in increasingly tight circles. As I watched, the horse abruptly tossed her head and released a series of irate bucks. I winced with each jolt, but Denny was right: Nic seemed glued to the saddle.

  “Did you know about this?” I hissed.

  “Of course not. I would never let her . . .” His voice trailed away as he gripped the top rail of the fence, his eyes pegged on Nic and the mare. They were at the far end of the ring, still moving in circles. It took everything in my power not to yell out to Nic, but I was too scared of surprising her or the horse to raise my voice.

  After several excruciatingly long minutes, Peach seemed to lose interest in killing my daughter. She moved into a canter now, tracing an invisible figure-eight pattern in the sand of the ring. Each time the pair crossed through the center of the eight, Peach lifted off the ground for a beat, swapped the direction of her lead midair, and landed smoothly on the new lead: a flying lead change. Moments earlier the horse had seemed ugly with rage, but now she was transformed: powerful and beautiful, too, the slope of her neck and neatly tucked nose almost regal.

  Even on that huge, gleaming horse, Nic looked strong. They looked like a match. I thought back to the many times that I’d watched my daughter ride Tru and the quiet loveliness that I’d seen in their partnership, the care they took with each other. Nic and Peach were different. I could practically hear Nic thinking the whole time that she rode. Peach pushed her, dared her. I could see this horse suffered no fools; lower your guard for a moment, and she would seize her advantage. Nic rose to the challenge. I’d never seen her ride so well. I’d probably never seen anyone ride so well.

  The hairs on my arms tingled.

  I was absolutely furious with my daughter, but I could no
t deny what I was seeing. I thought back to Nic’s urgent pleading in Dr. Feldman’s office. There was an urgency and intensity to how she rode today, too—and to how Peach responded. It was impossible to watch them and not feel moved.

  The horse turned down the centerline of the ring, still cantering. Nic looked in our direction, but didn’t seem to see us; her physical gaze was pinned in the direction she wanted her horse to move, but her focus was centered somewhere deep inside of herself. When they reached the dead center of the ring, Peach halted without any visible command from Nic. My daughter’s eyes focused; she smiled at me. Then she leaned forward to murmur something in the horse’s ear and stroke her neck. Peach walked on. Nic let out the reins a few inches, giving the horse room to stretch her neck. They stopped at the rail in front of us.

  “What were you thinking?” Denny asked her. There was an angry growl in his low voice.

  Before Nic could answer, Peach lowered her head almost to the ground and sighed loudly. Some emotion that I didn’t understand moved over Denny’s face. He lifted his hand and stroked Peach’s forehead twice.

  “She’s a good horse,” Nic said simply.

  “She’s not safe,” Denny responded, but there was doubt in his voice. If I heard it, Nic surely did, too.

  “She almost bucked you off!” I said, finally trusting myself to speak.

  Nic laughed. “Oh, that? She was a little fresh at first the last time, too. She just needs to blow off steam before she gets to work. I let her buck.” She abruptly clamped shut her mouth, but it was too late.

  I stared at my daughter. “What do you mean last time, too?”

  She began to play nervously with Peach’s mane. When she looked up again her eyes were wet with tears. She pressed her lips together.

  “Nic,” I said, forgetting for a moment to keep my voice low. The horse jerked up her head and gave a surprised snort, pinning back her ears and glaring at me from glittering black eyes.

  “Mind your manners, Peach,” Nic said. “That’s my mom.” My daughter’s voice was almost unrecognizable—it was clipped and authoritative, but gentle, too, a beast with a soft belly. The horse seemed to hear all of it. Her ears perked and rolled to the side, listening. “Mom, please don’t be mad. I had to ride Peach. I just had to.”