When he caught her, he grabbed her arm and yanked her to a stop. Fire flared in Natty’s eyes as she whirled to face him. Almost as quickly as he’d touched her arm, she yanked it away from him.
The argument, and it was most definitely an argument, went on for several seconds, and when she folded her arms across her chest, much the way Willow had when she’d been talking to Simon just moments earlier, I was pretty sure she was letting Thom know that whatever she was saying, whatever decision she’d made, was final. Unlike Simon, Thom looked defeated by her refusal to back down, and he just shook his head. And then he did the last thing I expected.
He reached out and brushed an invisible strand of hair from her cheek, tucking it neatly back into place behind her ear.
She didn’t flinch, or even react, but the gesture was so intimate that I nearly did. I’d spent almost three weeks here, holed up with these people, confiding in Natty about Tyler, and somehow I’d missed this . . . whatever it was, if it was anything at all.
But it was something, I was sure of it.
I glanced at Jett and his eyes widened back at me, an I-didn’t-know-either look, before I let myself spy on them once more, feeling more than a little voyeuristic now. And just when I thought the show was over, Thom’s nearly black eyes shifted away from Natty and slid all the way to where Jett and I stood—scratch that, to where I stood.
I wanted to turn away or to blink or anything to stop him from looking at me the way he was, but I couldn’t. The blame I felt coming from him had triggered my defiant streak—it was the same thing that had kept me from speaking to Simon for days on end, the same thing that had caused me to get out of my car after my championship game back on Chuckanut Drive the night I’d been taken in the first place. That condemning gaze rubbed me all kinds of wrong and I knew why, even without being told. I knew that Thom thought whatever Natty was up to was all my fault.
It was Natty who broke up our little staring contest, when she swiveled on her heel and shoved past Thom on her way to where Jett and I stood next to the vehicle.
“Check it out,” I said beneath my breath, trying my best not to crack a smile. “I think Natty’s planning to come with us.”
Jett leaned back on his heels and let out a low, almost inaudible whistle. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“Nope,” I added.
“Man, Simon is not gonna like this,” he stated, like that wasn’t the most obvious thing ever, and then he shut his mouth as soon as Natty was within earshot.
Natty didn’t say a word to either Jett or me, but she didn’t need to. She just climbed into the backseat and waited the remaining—I looked down at Jett’s watch—nineteen minutes.
And for once, even Simon managed to keep his mouth shut.
So Simon never really got the chance to say if he hated having Natty with us or not, because Thom seemed to have made his own decision the second Natty climbed in the SUV.
As if it were nothing, as if he weren’t abandoning his entire camp by doing so, Thom marched right up to Simon, getting closer than I’d ever seen the two of them get to each other, and announced, “I’m coming too.”
It wasn’t what Simon wanted to hear.
They faced off for a long tense minute, neither looking like they were going to blink first—not Thom, who intended to go wherever Natty went, and not Simon, who didn’t want Thom anywhere near his mission. The air was so thick with guy hormones it was hard to breathe. I was convinced someone was getting punched, and as I anticipated who it would be, my insides felt like someone had set a weed whacker to them.
And I guess that’s when I had the answer to my whole where-do-I-belong? thing, because I knew exactly who I was rooting for, no question.
Simon.
It was weird how quickly it came to me, especially considering how close I’d grown to Natty, and even to Thom and some of the other Silent Creek Returned. But as much as I liked being here, I’d mentally drawn my line in the sand in that instant, when I’d bristled at the idea of Thom hitting Simon.
Not that Willow would’ve let that happen anyway. I saw her reaction as clearly as I felt my own. She was there, ready to spring into action to defend her leader—any excuse she could get to swing a fist.
But it never came to that. Simon stepped aside, and all at once everything inside of me loosened as I realized there’d be no fight. “We can always use an extra set of hands,” Simon said, like it was no big deal that Thom was leaving his camp behind to join us.
Thom ignored Simon’s olive branch, if that’s even what it was, and shoved past him, making his own statement with his actions: he wasn’t doing this for Simon. He climbed all the way in the back, to the third row, where no one else was sitting. He didn’t acknowledge anyone, not even Natty, like she wasn’t the reason he was there in the first place.
“Can he do that?” I whispered to Jett before we got in too.
Jett just shrugged. “He can do whatever he wants. It’s his camp. Besides,” Jett said, looking back to where a few members of Thom’s camp council had gathered to see us off. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this place is like a well-oiled machine. I think they can spare him for a day or two.”
True, I thought, sliding in beside Natty and ignoring the tension already mounting inside the vehicle. If it kept up like this, I’d have a raging headache before we made it fifteen miles.
It felt strange leaving Silent Creek. It might not be my home, exactly, but I’d gotten sort of used to the orderliness of it here.