Abandon - Meg Cabot [10]
My voice trailed off. I didn’t like talking about what had happened back in my old school in Westport.
And what was the point in telling him? He’d been there.
He just stared at me. I was pretty sure from his expression that he wasn’t happy to see me. Of course, I’d just screamed in his face. That kind of thing doesn’t tend to endear you to people. Especially guys, I’d imagine.
“It’s not my fault,” I added. My heart was pounding so hard in my chest, I could barely hear the wind anymore, stirring the palm fronds overhead, or the crickets and cicadas between the crypts that rose from the shadows around us. “She wants to save the birds. What was I supposed to say?”
My voice sounded completely unlike my own. Well, no wonder. What girl would be able to speak normally with someone who looked like him glaring down at her? He was so tall — six foot four or five, nearly a foot taller than me — and his biceps and shoulders so wide, he’d easily have made tight end on any college football team in the country.…I’d suffered through enough games during “quality time” with my dad to be able to pick out the body type.
Except there wasn’t a coach alive who’d actually take him, due to his fairly obvious attitude problem. The black jeans, skintight black T-shirt, black tactical boots, and knuckles crisscrossed with scars — not just his knuckles, either — were dead giveaways he wasn’t going to play nicely with anyone. Even his hair, falling carelessly in thick, long brown waves around his face and his neck, seemed to scream dark.
Except his eyes. As gray as the clouds overhead, they’d always burned with a bright intensity I’d found difficult to forget…and believe me, I’d tried.
Not anymore, though. Now they looked dull, blank as twin bullet holes. You could almost say they were…well, dead eyes.
I wondered what had happened to him to cause the change. I certainly wasn’t to blame. I wasn’t that kind of girl.
His voice wasn’t dead. It was filled with sarcasm.
“I meant,” he said, “what are you doing here, now, tonight? In the cemetery. After hours.”
I swallowed hard.
Of course. Of course he knew what I was doing on Isla Huesos. He always seemed to know where I was and exactly what I was doing. He’d probably seen my plane touch down. He’d probably watched as I dragged my bags off the luggage carousel, and Mom helped me wheel them to the car. I wondered if he’d been watching when we’d had to struggle so hard to lift them into the back of her hybrid SUV because they were so heavy. Nice of him to come over and offer us some help.
I could practically feel the anger coming off his body in waves.
I knew I’d hurt him once (in my defense, he’d hurt me first. False imprisonment is a felony. I’d looked it up).
But given that he’d shown up twice since then to save my life — or at least I suppose that’s what he thought he was doing — I’d assumed he’d forgiven me.
Yet his eyes weren’t showing the slightest flicker of warmth, let alone remorse, for what he’d tried to do to me. So I guess I’d been wrong.
“Look,” I said, my voice a little gruff with some anger of my own. He had no right to be so rude. Sure, he’d surprised me, so I’d screamed.
But he’d known this whole time I’d been on the island and he’d never once stopped by to say hello? Not that I wanted him to, since every time he showed up, someone seemed to get hurt. But still.
“I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come by to make sure everything between us was, you know.” I realized I’d really dug myself into a hole with this one. Why hadn’t I listened to Mom and just stayed on my bike? “That there were no hard feelings.”
He continued to stare at me. “No hard feelings,” he echoed.
“Right,” I said. This was going even more horribly than I could have imagined. And clearly, I had a reputation for being able to imagine quite a bit. “I’m over what you did to me. And I just wanted to make sure that you understood that what I did to you…what happened when I…you know. Left. That it wasn’t personal.”
“Oh, I understand,