The Replaced(57)

Yet I was here, living in my own world. Trapped in a bubble. Caught between states of disbelief and hope so overpowering they threatened to smother me.

So far, all I had was that laugh, but it wasn’t enough to prove anything.

I took a step forward because I needed to know if it was him or if I’d only imagined it.

I turned toward the sound, but one of the floodlights was shining right in my face, and it was blinding me. All I could make out were several hazy outlines. It was enough to know that there was more than one person, and that they were almost to us now.

But I no longer cared about anyone else, because when the shadowy figures became clear, my grip on Simon’s arm tightened.

I saw him then. Undeniably.

I saw the way his green eyes squinted and his dimple creased his cheek as his eyes fell on Griffin.

“Tyler.” I croaked the word, and it barely made it past my lips, but it was the sweetest, most magnificent word I’d ever uttered, and suddenly the past twenty-three days melted away.

The last time I’d seen him, he’d been covered head-to-toe in pustules that had made it too painful to even touch him. He’d been blind and taking his very last breath.

This Tyler, though, the one standing before me now, was so incredibly-breathtakingly-irrefutably beautiful all I could do was stare. I took him in, and I felt myself come alive. It was as if I had just been returned all over again, seeing him standing there, alive. Whole.

Safe.

He stopped where he was, his feet planted on a patch of dry grass. There were so many expressions that passed over his face in those split seconds that there was no way I could catch them all. I totally understood how he felt. It was exactly what I was feeling too, finding him here of all places—confusion, shock, doubt, curiosity, relief.

“Tyler,” I said again, only this time it was louder as I let go of Simon, and I knew I was for sure going to cry in front of everyone.

“Kyra?” The hairs that had already been standing on end vibrated as his voice, a voice I’d been waiting to hear for three and a half weeks, a voice I’d willed myself to dream about, brushed over them.

I was running then, closing those last steps that separated us. I didn’t stop to ask why he was here, or to worry about whether Griffin or anyone else was watching, or what they thought about me or Tyler or the fact that we knew each other. I launched myself at him, and he caught me, wrapping his arms around me, and it was amazing to feel him.

To smell him. To know his heart was beating just inches beneath my own . . . that it was beating at all after everything he’d been through, after everything I’d put him through.

It had been a risk to take him to Devil’s Hole, and it had paid off. Tyler had been Returned.

“Tyler. Oh my god, Tyler . . .” I couldn’t bear to let go. I might never let go, I thought as I got lost in his embrace. He felt leaner than I remembered, which wasn’t at all impossible, and possibly more muscular, like maybe he’d been following the same workout regimen as the rest of Griffin’s camp.

But his T-shirt had that same Tyler smell I remembered, which made me think of home, and the thought came to me that I was home as long as I was with Tyler. I wanted to tell him so many things, including that, but for now, this—right here—was more than enough. More than I could have dared to hope for.

“Kyra,” he repeated, and I wondered how many times he’d said my name at the same time I’d said his. “I . . . I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I know,” I said back, while he pulled away and gazed down at me with this wonderstruck look in those incredible-amazing-brilliant green eyes of his, and I tried to decide if they were more brilliant than they’d been before or if they’d always been this dazzling. “I was thinking the same thing. How did you get here? How long have you been back?” My face crumpled as the tears finally broke to the surface. “I . . . I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”

Tyler crushed me to him, his chin bumping against the top of my head. It was all so familiar—the hug, and being consoled by Tyler, who was like that, familiar—that I almost didn’t hear what he said next. I mean, I heard it, it just didn’t make sense to me. “I was gonna say the same thing to you. I don’t think anyone thought they’d ever see you again.” His arms tightened and his voice rose, an elated kind of sound. “I can’t even imagine what Austin would think if he was here.”

My heart stopped again, but this time in a bad way.

And then he pulled back, and that hopeful look on his face fell away. “We can’t tell him,” he explained, saying it like this was new information to me, his voice dropping super low as he tried to make me understand. “Austin, your parents, they can’t know you’re back.”

I blinked. What the hell was he even talking about? They couldn’t know what . . . that I was back? I turned to Simon, whose face gave nothing away, and then to Griffin, who had her eyes trained solely on Tyler, and wasn’t paying any attention to me at all.

“You two know each other?” she asked Tyler, and there was something slippery about the way she looked at me, like she totally already knew all this. Like I’d been played.

Tyler glanced back at her and put his arm around my shoulder in a very pal-like way. Pals, he told her with that gesture, and my stomach sank achingly. “This is the neighbor I was telling you about. Kyra Agnew.” He shrugged, and his pal-hug tightened. “I’ve known her since . . . forever. No one’s seen her in . . .” He did the math and blinked at me, and even before he said how long it’d been, I wanted to vanish again because I knew where he was going with this. “Five years,” he finished, grinning down at me and letting out a low whistle. “Five long years.”