She was too busy thinking about how rough his skin felt against hers to pay attention to where she was going, and she nearly tripped over someone sitting on a blanket. To squeeze by the people, she had to walk among a few cypress trees, letting her free hand run along the bark of a tree as she walked by.
“Be careful,” Daniel said, apparently assuming that she was using the trees to steady herself. “That’s why I got you the glow bracelet. So you can see where you’re going.”
“Glow bracelets don’t give off as much light as you’d think. They’re more decorative than functional.”
“Ah, I understand now,” Daniel said, taking her wrist in his hand. “That makes so much sense.”
She turned to smile up at him, leaning back against the tree behind her, and he let go of her wrist. She thought they’d start walking away, but he moved closer to her. One of his hands was on the tree trunk next to her, the other rested warmly on her waist.
A strange smile played on his lips, and he shook his head.
“What?” Harper asked.
“I just wish you weren’t so beautiful,” he replied simply.
She laughed. “That’s a strange thing to wish.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“And why is that?” she asked. She could feel him leaning down to her, his body pressing against her.
“Because I didn’t want it to happen like this. Or at least not here, like this, with people swarming around us, against a tree,” Daniel said. “But you look so, so beautiful, and I just can’t resist.”
“You didn’t want what to happen like this?” Harper asked softly, but she already knew.
His lips were nearly touching hers when he said, “The first time I kissed you.”
Then he was kissing her, and everything else went silent. Harper put her arms around his neck, pulling him to her, and he kissed her deeply, pushing her against the tree behind her. Daniel had a bit of stubble, and it scraped against her skin as he kissed, but she loved the way it felt.
It ended far too quickly, with Daniel pulling away, while Harper leaned against the tree, struggling to catch her breath. It was probably for the best, since there were people everywhere, and she didn’t want to make out in front of everybody.
But she was still sad when it was over. Nobody had ever kissed her like that before, and she actually felt weak in the knees. She’d always just assumed that was a figure of speech, but Daniel made her feel that way.
“Should we head down to the beach?” Daniel asked.
“Uh, yeah.” She smiled and nodded.
He took her hand again. She stayed close to him, but this time it was because she was afraid she might fall. She hung on to his arm, and he made a joke that she couldn’t really hear over the music, but she laughed anyway.
“Is here good?” Daniel asked.
They were at the top of the beach, right where the grass turned into sand. It appeared to be one of the few places where they could sit without being right on top of someone else.
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Here’s great.”
She glanced around, just to make sure they weren’t stealing the spot from anybody else, and that was when Harper saw her.
It was almost as if the crowd had parted around Penn just so Harper could see her. She stood at the edge of the grass, her black eyes blazing, and smiled widely at Harper, revealing her abnormally sharp teeth.
TWENTY-NINE
Instincts
Gemma had thought about hanging downstairs with her dad. She liked Indiana Jones well enough, and she was trying to spend time with Brian while she could. Unlike Harper and Alex, she wasn’t convinced there was a way out for her.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t committed to trying. She just didn’t have high hopes for it.
Just the same, she wanted to spend some time by herself. Between living with the sirens, then being babysat constantly since she got home, Gemma felt like she’d hardly had any time to be alone to collect her thoughts.
Gemma hadn’t been sleeping well, either, and not just because of the nightmares about Jason or the watersong nagging her for being so far away from the other sirens.
Yesterday, Alex had told her that he loved her, and while that thrilled her endlessly, it also raised a new question. How was that possible? The sirens had repeatedly told Gemma that it wasn’t possible, that nobody could ever truly a love a siren, but Alex did love her.
There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he did. Alex couldn’t lie that convincingly, and when they were together, he acted like a normal person. She’d spent enough time around Sawyer to understand what a guy acted like when he was under the spell of a siren.
Alex wasn’t acting that way at all. He was clearheaded, and when he told Gemma he loved her, he meant it.
She’d actually woken up this morning hoping the curse would be broken. But of course it wasn’t that simple. She was still a siren, no matter how Alex felt about her.
So that meant one of two things: either the sirens had lied to her, or they were wrong about humans being able to love sirens.