“Okay,” she agrees slowly. She blurts it out in a rush. “You should know that Lo asked Echlios two days ago who you were.”
Turns out truth is overrated.
I’m a nervous wreck. Not because I’m seeing Lo for the first time in months, but because there’s a huge chance he won’t even recognize me. I think that’s why Echlios wanted to prepare me before I saw him. There’s also a good chance that Lo may recognize me if I’m right in front of him, but I don’t want to give myself false hope.
“Are you okay?” Echlios asks, as he pulls into Lo’s driveway.
“Fine.”
“That’s six ‘fines’ since we left the house.”
“What do you want me to say, Echlios? That I’m terrified? That I’m scared out of my mind that the boy I’ve bonded with won’t know who I am? That I’m going to lose him? That without him, it feels like I won’t be able to hold myself together? That without him, I’m dissolving?” I say in a dead, emotionless voice. “Let’s just leave it at ‘fine,’ okay?”
Echlios’s jaw drops open. “I didn’t...realize.”
I swallow thickly. It’s completely incongruous, really, the whole situation. I’m the one who was hung up on the whole bonding thing. Lo and I bonded. But something inside me couldn’t quite sit with the idea that I was tricked, and instead of accepting what was completely natural and consensual on both sides, I pushed it away. And now there’s a very real possibility that the boy I love doesn’t even know who I am.
“It’s okay. Let’s just get it over with,” I say, forcing a bravado that I don’t feel into my voice.
Grayer, Lo’s valet-slash-butler, opens the door. His face is as stoic as I remember, but something like pity flashes in his eyes for a second, making me want to scrape that dead expression off his face with my nails. I don’t want his pity, or anyone’s for that matter, because it means that I’ve already lost.
“Where is he?” I blurt out, earning a censorious glance from Echlios. But I don’t care. I want to see Lo for myself before reading other people’s expressions and having to accept their hidden compassion.
“He’s over here,” a blonde, hefty-looking woman says from down the hall.
“Hi, Bertha.”
Bertha, Lo’s housekeeper, is as Amazonian-looking as ever, but she manages a small smile in my direction before enfolding me into an unexpected bear hug. Her affection throws me for a minute, but Lo is the closest thing she has to a son and I know that she knows how Lo feels—felt—about me. I return the hug a little more fiercely than I’d intended, stunned by my sudden surge of emotion.
“How is he?” I ask.
“We have our good days and our bad days. He’s having a good day today. He surfed early this morning and seems to be in bright spirits. Come.” She gestures for me to follow her into the sunroom that overlooks the ocean and the entire La Jolla coastline down to the beach below. Echlios and Grayer follow like silent shadows. I don’t want to let my eyes linger on the beach beyond the wall-to-wall glass windows...and the exact spot where Lo and I were together...but I do, anyway.
And then I turn in slow motion to the boy getting up from the couch. My heart climbs its way into my throat and stays there, choking me with silent, vicious pain. He looks the same—the salt-bleached sandy hair that’s now curling into his collar, the bronzed sunburned cheekbones, and the wide, smiling mouth. Those dark, bottomless blue eyes reach into the most hidden parts of me and claim ownership. They’re full of polite interest, but there’s no recognition in them at all. I can’t breathe, far less speak.
“Lo, you have a special visitor,” Bertha says gently, her face stricken, mirroring my own response, still stuck in my chest. “This is Nerissa.”
His eyes narrow at the sound of my name, but nothing clicks in them that suggests he recognizes it. Lo glances at Bertha and she nods. He looks confused for a second but then smiles widely and sticks his hand out. “Hi, Nerissa.”
The sound of his warm voice wrapping around my name is my undoing. That hasn’t changed—not the way he and only he says my name, like it’s a sensual act instead of a mere word. Even if he doesn’t know me, some part of him still does. It has to. I can’t help myself—I step closer, ignoring his outstretched palm, and wrap my arms around the nape of his neck. I breathe in the smell of salt on his skin and press my temple against the soft stubble on the underside of his jaw. His body tenses, but I feel his arms slip around my waist in a tentative hug. I hug tighter, tears smarting behind my eyelids at how intimately familiar his human body feels against mine.
“It’s good to see you, Lo,” I whisper against his neck.
As if a spell has been broken, Lo pulls away, his eyes narrowing a fraction in frustration as he struggles to remember. “So you’re Nerissa? Bertha told me that we were friends.”
“Friends,” I repeat, hearing my own voice break slightly on the word.
“We went to school together, right? Dover?”
I swallow hot bile at his nervous recitation. Even prepared, his reaction comes as a shock. I don’t even want to look at Bertha or Grayer, or even Echlios. I don’t want to see the expressions on their faces. Instead I smile through trembling cheeks and watery eyes. “Yes. We met at Dover. You don’t remember me at all?”
The look in his eyes is tortured, as if he’s struggling to place me in his head. “There’s a part of me that feels like it does know you,” he says, gesturing to his chest. “But I can’t remember it here.” His fingers jerk to his head and then flutter to his sides in a defeated motion. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him in a choked voice. “You’ll remember.”
“I had some kind of seizure while driving and now I have a concussion—” Lo points to his skull “—hence the amnesia. I’m sorry I don’t remember much,” he says to me, and then forces a grin, one that still makes my knees turn into rubber. “I’d like to think yours is a face I wouldn’t forget, but I guess the silver lining is that we get to know each other and be friends again.”
But obviously, he has forgotten—not just meeting me, but me, period. “I’d like that,” I say, unable to voice the truth that we are so much more than friends. I avoid Echlios’s eyes. “You seem to be taking it well, your memory loss.”
Lo shrugs, his mouth twisting in that casual, cute way of his, as if he’s trying to put on a brave front. “I’m hoping the doctors will fix it eventually. I just have to do the therapy and hope that it comes back. Freaking out doesn’t help anyone.”
It sounds so much like something he’d say that it’s hard to think that parts of him aren’t all there, or that maybe he’s pretending and this is some big prank. But I know it isn’t. I see it in his eyes—in that assessing look people give you when they’re meeting you for the first time. He doesn’t remember me at all.
“I’m sorry.”
Lo slides me a soft smile. “I guess I remember the big things. The little things will come back in time.” He trails off in awkward silence but then grins brightly. “Hey, I’m parched. You want a drink? Bertha makes the best pink lemonade this side of the Pacific.”
Dying a little inside, I nod, and he walks out of the room, followed by a silent Bertha. I sit weak-kneed on the couch that Lo vacated a few minutes before, my heart feeling as if it’s being crushed beneath a hammer.... I remember the big things.
“Exactly