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He doesn’t say anything else.
He lets the shadows move over him, his hands in his pockets, and looks at me with his beautiful face.
With ridiculously belated understanding, my stomach turns over and flops onto the ground. A slideshow of the way he was after the beach ticks through my mind like a fan of index cards rippling through someone’s fingers.
He hadn’t wanted to go to sleep, and when he did, he fell hard. The dreams never took very long to come. It wasn’t always easy to wake him up. He wasalwayspanicked. Always disoriented.
It’s not physically possible for Jameson to have stayed awake every night since his parents died. He would have died, too, if not from his brain going haywire then from a car accident or something similar.
I think it was possible for him to be awake most of that time.
I think hewasawake most of that time.
“You stayed up and got three different degrees.”
“Mm-hmm.” He runs his hands over his hair. “I need another shower.”
“Oh, good! I’m going to watch.”
“Wow. I’m once again objectified.” Jameson picks up the axe, balances it on his shoulder, and leaves his wood-chopping project behind. He bumps his hip into me on his way past, a cute, normal gesture that makes my heart warm. Jameson’s shirt is a crumpled pile of fabric by the stump, so I do my part and retrieve it, then hurry to catch up with him. We have a cute, normal walk to his shed.
While Jameson’s hanging up the axe, I finish my lemonade and check him out. The storage shed isn’t very full. There’s a saw on one wall and a lawnmower in the back corner, and…
Several shiny cans of gasoline lined up next to each other.
His voice comes back to me.
We’d been talking about his parents and what happened after they died. I knew by then that he’d left something out when he told me the story on the beach, and during that conversation, he gave me the missing piece.
The missing piece was my grandfather.
Jameson had come to the neighborhood the night he kidnapped me because of my grandfather, not because of me.
But…
I was going to burn his house down with the two of you inside.
“Hey, Jameson?”
“Yeah?” He turns around, axe-hanging finished, his expression open.
I point one of my toes at the cans. “Were these…” The words get lost on the way out, and I have to find them again. “Was this how you were going to burn down my grandfather’s house?”
He frowns at the cans. “I’m not sure it would have been enough. But that’s what I got.”
I give the cans another look. Alonglook.
“Lily.”
“Hmm?”
Jameson’s watching me, his brow furrowed. “Do those freak you out?”
I think of Grandpapa looking into my face and that split-second flicker of sheer disgust. I don’t want his house burned down, but…
“No,” I tell Jameson, and mean it.
He takes another shower, and I watch.
