Page 2 of I'm Gonna Get You Back
The next moment a gust of wind shook the trees around us. I draped my jacket across her shoulders just as she pulled her hair down to take a photo of us—the first.
“You smell like a meadow,” I said in place of all the other things I longed to tell her.
She laughed again and showed me the picture. It was the kind that somehow captured both the moment and the beating heart within it. The kind you frame.
I blinked in surprise when she wrapped her arms around my waist and let out a contented sigh, her warm breath skimming my throat. Confidence surged through me every time she allowed herself to soften to me.
“I do love it here,” she said.
“Me too.” But I wasn’t talking about the overlook.
I held her tighter. Relishing the rare opportunity of having her tomyself—suspended for a moment from the looming Legacy decision and all the overbearing rules and suffocating pressures that came with it.
All that we were up against.
My hand trailed the side of her rib cage down to the hem of her shirt. Her eyes fluttered closed when I slipped my fingertips under it, grazing the warm skin of her hip bone and drawing her close until she was a breath away.
Her tone was playfully scolding when she said, “Are you quite done?”
“Done?” I smiled against her lips. “Pretty sure we’re just getting started.”
CHAPTER TWOCLARANOW
TEN DAYS UNTIL LEGACY BANQUET
FILMING HIM ALWAYS FELTas easy as breathing.
But watching this footage of Reid now cuts my air clean off.
In the clip, the late-afternoon sun streams through the trees as he looks out over the mountain from my favorite trail. Our trail. Only the soft ends of his dark hair peek out from under a beanie, curling at the nape of his neck. He’s looking at me over the camera with a bright, unguarded light in his eyes.
Nothing like how he’d look at me now.
I should turn it off. If I don’t want to cry, I should definitely turn off this clip I accidentally opened. But an overwhelming longing roots me to the spot. The memory flooding as I watch it play out in real time on the screen of the laptop that I’ve indefinitely borrowed from Woodhurst High despite having graduated five months prior.
This must have been last spring, just before it got warm.
“Can I help you?” Reid asks.
It’s a shot straight through my solar plexus hearing his deep voice again. I thought I remembered it well. I fall asleep replaying our conversations in my mind often enough. But I forgot the subtle gruffness. The teasing nature that he reserved just for me. I make it through the next moments of it fine until I hear myself say off-screen, “As usual, just ignore me.” My disembodied voice is lighter and happier than I’ve felt in months.
The corner of his mouth lifts. “As usual, that’s impossible.”
I can guess that off camera I’m rolling my eyes the way I always did when I tried to hide how he unraveled me. Because on camera he grins the way he always did when he knew that he had.
I want to reach for my phone to text him, call him—anythinghim. But I squeeze my eyes shut against the impulse. Against the familiar tidal wave of missing him. That was then.
As if ensuring I don’t do something reckless, the wail of the smoke alarm sounds overhead. I whip around at the scent of burnt popcorn and see the smoke streaming from the stovetop.
Perfect.
I rush to turn it off and use a dish towel to fan the smoke out the open window, willing the alarm to shut up. I don’t need any of our neighbors, who are mostly my family, popping over to check on me like they do when Mom’s on overnights at the hospital. Ever since Dad left for good last year, they’ve beenhovering. Within an hour, an exaggerated story about how my house almost burned down would be all over Woodhurst. This town is too small for its own good.
With a few more shakes of the towel, the alarm stops just as the front door opens.
“Clara?” Mitchell calls. “Whoa! What died in here?”
I slam the laptop shut and force my features into benign amusement by the time he reaches the kitchen. “Oh, just my dignity.”
