Page 14 of Fade (Fighting Fate)

“Hey,” I returned. “Mind if I sit?”

“Of course not. Has your friend gone?”

I looked back to where I’d been sitting with Amber. “Yeah, she had to go see her brother.” It was true. Kind of. Give or take a few hours.

Folding myself down on the grass near Daniel, I tried to calm my racing heart, but when I looked up and found him watching me with a tiny grin, I gave up.

Clearing my throat, I tried for casual. “So, you’re here for the summer?”

His grin curved up more on one side. Oh, my lord.

“Yeah, until the end of August,” he said softly.

“Yo

u’ve never been before,” I said, stating the obvious.

His smile slipped a little, and he looked out across the park. “No. My dad refused to let me leave the state, so Mom and Ryan had to come to New York if they wanted to see me.”

My jaw dropped a little at his words. Ryan had never said anything about that.

“It was hard,” he admitted. “I was pretty angry for a long while. Mom could never visit for long—only two weeks during the summer.”

“Oh, my God. I never knew,” I said. Like it would make a difference if I had.

He smiled again. “Yeah, so I’m looking forward to a whole summer.”

I bit my lip. It was strange. To Daniel, the concept of a whole summer was a long time. To me, when I thought of the time I could possibly spend with him, it was way too short.

“Can I ask how you came to be a marine?”

One side of his mouth curled up, but it slowly faded as thoughts flashed in the depths of his eyes. “I was pretty angry after my parents split. I was angry that Mom left without me. I was angry that Dad wouldn’t let me go visit her. I was just angry. At everyone. I did everything I could to make them both see it too. I goofed off in school, hung out with the wrong people, anything. By the time I was halfway through my sophomore year, Dad had had enough. I came home from being suspended for the fifth time that year, and he already had my bags packed for military school.”

Even though I’d heard Ryan talk about it before, it sounded so much worse the way Daniel said it. I guessed that was because Daniel had the emotion to go with it. The experience of living it. My eyes widened. “Just like that?”

Again, he grinned his crooked smile. “Just like that. What he didn’t know, though, was that he was doing me the biggest favor he ever could have done. It took me a few weeks to settle in and stop being so pissed at the world, but after that, I started to feel like I belonged. I started doing really well at school, getting good grades and good reports. I knew after that first year finished that I’d found my calling. And the best part of all was that I’d beaten my dad at his own game.”

I laughed. As much as I wasn’t a spiteful person, I did like that bit of it. “Is it bad that that makes me happy?”

Daniel laughed too. It was a sexy, gravelly kind of sound. Different than Ryan’s laugh. Deeper. It had a kind of vibration that seemed to touch me in some way. “Not at all.”

Exhaling a contented breath, I gave him a warm smile. “So, have you got many plans for the summer?”

“No. No plans. The plan,” he said, accentuating the word, “was to just enjoy what time I could with Mom and Ryan, while I could.”

His expression darkened, and I was suddenly worried about what had made him go there. “What?”

“I just . . .” He dropped his gaze to the ground between us. “Ryan. He’s changed. I didn’t see him the last summer Mom came. He didn’t want to. So it’s been three years since I saw him last. I don’t know this arrogant, self-absorbed dick.”

He sighed and glanced up at me quickly before looking away again. He looked like he wanted to say more but didn’t know how. I got the feeling he didn’t usually talk much, but I loved listening to the sound of his voice. Although it was extremely similar to Ryan’s, it had a kind of depth to it that Ryan’s didn’t.

“What?” I asked again.

His gaze met mine and locked. “I talked to him briefly just before I came here today. He was there—the old Ryan. He does still care, but . . . ” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought maybe this whole arrogance thing was a cover-up—a way to cope with our shitty situation—but then I remembered how he treated you last week, and I realized it doesn’t matter.”

I blinked at him while I processed his words. As I continued to gather my thoughts, I plucked a blade of grass from the ground and watched my fingers as I twirled it around.

“I saw that side of him too,” I said quietly. “In my mind, that’s who I was dating. I seriously don’t think I would’ve dated him at all if I hadn’t seen it.”

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