Wake

“You look cold. Do you need a coat or something?” Alex started to move back inside the house to get something to warm her, but she grabbed his arm to stop him.

 

“No, Alex, listen. I just need to ask you something.” Gemma glanced around, as if she expected Harper to be lurking around a corner. “Can we talk for a minute?”

 

“Yeah, sure, of course.” He stepped closer to her and put his hands on her arms, feeling strong and warm against her bare skin. “What’s going on? You look frantic.”

 

“I’ve just had the most amazing, terrible night of my life,” Gemma admitted, and she was surprised when she felt tears stinging her eyes.

 

“Why? What happened?” Alex’s brown eyes filled with concern.

 

His worried expression made him look older, more like the man he would someday become, and Gemma’s heart ached when she realized that she would probably never see that. Already he was almost painfully handsome, made even more attractive by how oblivious he was to it.

 

He was much taller than she was, almost towering above her, and his muscled frame only made her feel safer. It was his eyes—a deep mahogany that conveyed so much warmth and kindness—that let her know he’d never do anything to hurt her.

 

“It doesn’t matter.” She shook her head. “I needed to know … do you like me?”

 

“Do I like you?” His worry changed to bemused relief, and he smiled crookedly at her. “Come on, Gemma, I think you know the answer to that.”

 

“No, Alex, I’m serious. I need to know.”

 

“Yeah.” He brushed back a damp lock from her forehead, and his eyes were solemn. “I like you. A lot, actually.”

 

“Why?” Her voice cracked when she asked that, and she almost wished she hadn’t said anything.

 

His admission had made her stomach swirl with butterflies and her heart soar, but then both her heart and her stomach clenched with fear. She wasn’t certain that Alex would know why he liked her.

 

If he was under the spell of the siren, he’d only know that he lusted after her, with no discernible reason for it.

 

“Why?” Alex laughed at that. “What do you mean, why?”

 

“It’s important to me,” she insisted, and something in her expression convinced him how grave this was.

 

“Um, because.” He shrugged, finding it hard to find the words. “You’re so … so pretty.” Her heart dropped at that, but he went on, “And you have a wicked sense of humor. You’re sweet, and you’re smart. And impossibly driven. I’ve never met anybody as determined as you. Anything you want, you’ll get. You are way, way too cool for me, and you still let me hold your hand, even when we’re in public.”

 

“You like me for me?” Gemma asked, staring up at him.

 

“Yeah, of course. Why else would I like you?” Alex asked. “What? Did I say something wrong? You look like you’re going to cry.”

 

“No, you said everything just right.” She smiled up at him, tears swimming in her eyes.

 

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. Tentatively, he wrapped his arms around her, and as she kissed him more deeply, he lifted her off the ground. Her arms were around his neck, and she was practically clinging to him.

 

“Gemma!” Harper shouted from her bedroom window, and Gemma’s heart sank when she realized they’d been spotted.

 

Alex put her back on the ground, but they were slow to untangle from each other. His forehead rested against hers, and she kept her hand on the back of his neck, burying her fingers in his hair.

 

“Promise me you’ll remember this,” Gemma whispered.

 

“What?” Alex asked, confused.

 

“Me, as I am right now. The real me.”

 

“How could I ever forget you?”

 

Before Alex could ask anything else, Gemma left, running over to her house without looking back.

 

 

 

 

 

SIXTEEN

 

 

The Dirty Gull

 

Harper chewed her lip and stared at The Dirty Gull. Her father’s crumpled lunch sack in her hand, she’d been pacing the dock in front of Daniel’s boat for the past few minutes. This had never happened before, and she didn’t know what to do.

 

Nearly every time she took her father his lunch, Daniel would inevitably be outside in some capacity so she’d run into him. Every other time it had happened, she’d tried to avoid him, but now that she actually wanted to see him, he wasn’t out here.

 

He didn’t exactly have a front door, so she couldn’t knock, and it seemed too dramatic to stand on the dock shouting his name. Harper supposed she could climb onto the boat, but that seemed awfully presumptuous.

 

In truth, she didn’t even really know why she wanted to see him. Part of it was because everything was so messed up with Gemma, and Harper couldn’t talk to her or Alex about it. Those were the people she usually went to with her problems, since Marcy wasn’t exactly known for her listening skills.

 

That sounded so horrible. Harper wanted to see Daniel because she had nobody else to dump her problems on.