Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(49)
My mother looked up in surprise. “I thought she was with you?”
My dad and John returned from the bird-watching trail, and they hadn’t seen Sam, either. She was just gone. We began to search, our calls for Sam growing more and more frantic by the moment. I felt the desperate, crushing panic of knowing that I had failed my sister.
“Allie. Allie!” There was something warm on my hand. I opened my eyes and saw John kneeling in front of me, his fingers resting on mine. He was wearing a black button-down, untucked, over a white T-shirt, and his usual denim jacket. He’d just walked in the door. “You were calling for Sam.” His dark eyes were concerned.
I took a deep breath to tell him I was fine, it was just a dream—but I realized if I opened my mouth I was going to burst into tears. I clenched my jaw and shook my head a little, trying for a rueful smile, but John knew me too well. He gave my hands a sharp tug, pulling me forward and into his arms. It surprised me, but after a moment I threw my arms around his neck and held on for dear life, letting myself have the hug. He smelled like detergent and his house, that particular scent that places get through the unique combination of their contents. Sam had smelled the exact same way. When Charlie was born, it had just added to the scent a little, giving it a note of baby wipes and diaper ointment.
“I dreamed about that time in the park,” I whispered, when I was sure of my voice. “We lost her, remember?”
“She’d just gone back to the car to get her book,” John reminded me, his lips in my hair. He relaxed his grip, expecting me to pull away, but I wasn’t ready to look him in the eyes yet, so I hung on. He let me. “She was fine, Allie.”
“Don’t call me Allie,” I mumbled.
John released me and leaned back on his heels, and I suddenly realized that I had slid off the chair and was kneeling beside him. He pushed the hair out of my eyes with one hand, hooking it behind my ear. “Why not?” he asked.
I blinked in surprise. My family had asked me the same question a hundred times when I’d come home from Iraq. I’d just said I was used to Lex now, and I preferred it. This was the first time John had questioned the name. “Sam always thought it was to punish yourself, because you lived and your friends died,” he said quietly.
“She was wrong.” Maybe it was the dream, or maybe I was still partly asleep, but I told him the truth. “It’s because Allie died, too.”
John just nodded, his eyes probing mine. Twenty-five years stretched between us in that look, two and a half decades of love and grief and missed chances. I focused on the clock behind his head. Five to eight. “Oh, shit!” I cried, jumping up. “I have to be somewhere.”
“We should talk—” John began, but I grabbed my hoodie off the couch and skirted around him.
“Gotta run.”
Chapter 22
On the way back to my cabin I took several deep breaths, trying to clear the scent of John’s house from my mind.
John had been my first crush, from the moment he gave me CPR on a little beach along the Arkansas River, saving my life—or so I’d thought at the time, anyway. I’d carried that stupid, hormone-fueled torch for years. Then the towers at the World Trade Center fell, and the course of my life changed.
Sam supported my decision to join the army, but the rest of my family was disappointed and worried. My father, who’d spent much of his young adulthood protesting the Vietnam War, begged me to stay home, but eventually even he became resigned to my enlistment. It was John, of all people, who couldn’t stop fighting my decision. He couldn’t understand why I would want to leave Boulder for the army, why I thought it was my duty to help protect our country. We argued all throughout the summer after senior year, about the war, about politics, about patriotism. He said I was too smart for the army, I said that was a bullshit elitist attitude, and after circling around and around the issue for three months, he’d finally declared his feelings for me.
We spent one night together, at my parent’s cabin, which was now my home. And then we said good-bye, neither of us able to accept the other’s position.
John and Sam both matriculated at CU that fall, and I was deployed shortly thereafter. By the time I came home between my two tours, we had all moved on. John and Sam were dating, and I had a couple of relationships with fellow soldiers under my belt. More importantly, I was a different person. Harder, and sadder, and more determined than ever to be a soldier. I’d spent my whole childhood protecting Sam; as an adult I’d finally found a way to protect something bigger than one person, bigger than a million people. Okay, Sam and John’s relationship stung a little, but for the most part my thoughts were on the other side of the world, with my fellow soldiers. I had a different life.
Sam and I drifted apart, though that had more to do with me being on the other side of the planet than it did with her dating my high school crush. When I eventually came home from the hospital in Germany, Sam re-emerged as a crucial part of my life, and John went where Sam went. Simple enough. I was so damaged then, the black cloud ever-present in my thoughts, that I barely felt any connection to the teenaged Allie who had loved John. I didn’t know that girl anymore, and I was genuinely glad that Sam and John had found happiness together.
But now Sam was gone, and John and I were both alone, both without her. I saw him all the time, of course, especially once I started babysitting on Fridays. But I’d kept a distance between us, mostly out of fear. There was just something very seductive about the last person in the world who knows you to the core . . . and cares for you anyway.